Meanwhile, in a significant decision, ISPs have been allowed to share their bandwidth with other ISPs. The guidelines also state that the landing station for International Gateway for should be within the service area of the ISP licensee, should be located within 100 km of the sea shore. The distance has been upped from 50 km as initially proposed by the Government.

The government will also not allow landing stations to be set up in the security sensitive areas, which have been identified as of now as, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, North Eastern States, Andaman and Nicobar islands, and coastal regions of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu (excluding Chennai).

Exclusion of Chennai from the security sensitive area list is a major achievement for NASSCOM and the ISP industry, who had been pleading for the same, since Chennai is the closest point from the Sinagapore hub.

The guidelines also state that the transmission link between the ISP node/point of presence and the landing station, if they are not co-located, should be from any of the operators specially authorized to lease such links.

Monitoring requirements/facilities
The guidelines regarding monitoring are very stringent. The companies will have to bear the entire cost of monitoring, including buying and deploying monitoring equipment, besides providing at each location, a physically secured office, which will be accessible only to the personnel authorized by the Telecom Authority.

The office which will be provided free of cost by the licencee, should be set up in the space of 20 feet x 20 feet, with adequate uninterrupted power supply, air-conditioning, and an exclusive telephone line at the monitoring centre, again at the cost of the licencee.

The ISPs will also have to provide monitoring software, if specially, developed for monitoring traffic at cable landing terminal, to the security agencies free of cost. In addition to all this, the ISP licencee will also have to contribute Rs 20 lakh per annum towards the administrative cost for performing monitoring function.

The guidelines also say that agencies authorised by the government should be able to monitor all types of traffic passed through the landing terminals, including data, fax, speech, video and multimedia etc, both in interactive and non-interactive modes.

It should also be possible to scan through entire traffic passing through the gateway and filter the traffic as per the key words/ expressions and addresses defined by the security agencies.

Each of the security agencies should be provided with a specified dedicated space/memory/directory/storage in the monitoring centre computer. Remote accessing/log-in facility for every security agencies should be possible through fully secured unique password.

It should be possible to monitor the same traffic by more than one security agency simultaneously. However, no agency should know the traffic being monitored by other agencies.

Also, good quality intrusion detection system to ensure that the landing station (link) does not become a launch pad for attacking sites within India. And any attempted intrusion, noticed by the licensee, should be immediately reported to the Telecom Authority.

The ISP licensee will have to furnish all the billing details of any subscriber on demand by the authorities. The ISP licensee will also have to block all Internet sites and individual subscribers, as identified by Telecom Authority.

The guidelines also specified that the landing stations should be used only for carrying Internet traffic. The guidelines also say that the ISP licensee setting up the landing station cannot claim any right to carry voice traffic, whenever the sector is opened up for private participation.

The guidelines, which were worked out by a committee of representatives from Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Ministry of Information Technology, and NASSCOM, are available at www.dotindia.com.Feom