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The DoT is expected to introduce regulations that will open up access to landing stations of international long distance players for rival companies’ submarine cables.

Currently, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Reliance Communications, Bharti and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd carry bandwidth to India through seven locations. Trai had recommended to the DoT to allow equal access at the cable landing stations (CLS), including landing facilities for submarine cables, to licensed operators on a non-discriminatory basis, without any sunset clause.

The Economic Times confirms that the DoT has ordered ISPs to only block the blogs in question rather than entire domains or IP addresses.

DoT has also issued a show cause notice to ISPs following pressure from the government. “The DoT has further sought explanation from the erring ISPs as to why action be not taken against them for blocking unintended websites and webpages,” a government notice on the issue said.

Wipro has announced that it will be offering e-waste disposal services to their customers from September 1. This improves compliance with the RoHS and ISO 14000 standards.

On various measures taken within Wipro, Ashutosh Vaidya, vice-president, personal computing division, said, "Wipro has been actively working on the issue since August, 2005. We had set up an environment management team to lead Wipro's initiatives on this front. Over the last one year, we have defined the process, identified suitable disposal mechanisms, created service points across the country, identified technically competent disposal agencies and setup a process for disposal of e-waste."

It appears that ISPs all across India have been ordered by the Indian government to block a number of key websites on the Internet.

ISPs are believed to have been asked to block sites like bloodspot.com, hinduhumanrights.org, hinduuni-ty.org and clickatell.com, besides frontline blogs like the Google-owned blogsp-ot.com. Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of ISP Association of India said: “We have received a letter from DoT, asking us to block around 18 URLs.”

Though the communication, dated July 13, by the telcom department to ISPs lists specific pages/ websites, several ISPs have blocked all blogs because they were not equipped to filter specific pages. This could be because all websites hosted on blogspot.com, for instance, have the same IP address.

Officials defended the decision saying, "We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."

The TRAI has decided to withdraw its consultation paper which recommended not placing IPTV under the purview of the Cable act. This follows strong opposition from the cable and broadcasting industry over the last week.

The basic intention behind the proposed amendments in the Cable Television (Regulation) Act, 1995 was to keep the IPTV service outside the definition of `cable services’.

Today’s development notwithstanding, the regulator played down the issue. “The chairman has indicated that probably the consultation paper needs to be revised. We would take a final decision soon,” a Trai official told Indiantelevision.com in the evening.

Source: Indian television.

The Financial Express has a story on the ongoing dispute between cable TV / DTH operators and telecom majors over the classification of IPTV; i.e. should IPTV be categorised under the cable TV act or the Telegraph act?

Cable consortium MSO Alliance stated that if IPTV was kept outside the cable laws, cable operators could not upgrade their IPTV services to digital IPTV without unified licence.

The stakeholders urged Trai to amend the Act to include voice, video and data.

This was in reponse to a TRAI proposal that recommended IPTV not be treated as cable TV.

Sources: The financial express, Indian television.

Point topic recently released figures on world-wide DSL usage with India figuring prominently in the list for the first time. As of March 2006, India was estimated to have 1,088,935 subscribers, ranking 22nd overall.

Of the established nations, with more than one million DSL subscribers as at 31 March 2006, India topped the percentage growth ranking, increasing its subscriber base by more than 700% in twelve months. Significant subscriber increases were also made in Turkey (190% increase), Mexico (99%) and Australia (84.6%). Pakistan growth (484%) led the way in countries with less than one million DSL subscribers, with Morocco, Greece and Bulgaria all experiencing DSL growth of more than 200%.

Sources: Point Topic, DSL Forum [PDF].

Janabhaaratii, a localisation project initiated by C-DAC Mumbai in 2004, is looking for contributors.

The company announced that it would build the translators' familiarity with Indian language text-processing on the Free Software GNU/Linux platform, teach about different kinds of translations and issues involved, and offer tools to support translations.

Janabhaaratii is working to localise Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Its plans include contributing to the community efforts in developing a software suite based on GNU/Linux and made available in Indian languages.

Full story: Economic Times.