Not Another Mobile Phone Blog

The recent terrorist attacks on India has forced Department of Telecommunications a.k.a DoT in India to come down hard on mobile phones that have a fake or no IMEI number. Most of these phones are available from China and they have penetrated well inside the India mobile user base. Surprisingly, in India there are some 25 to 30 million handsets that DoT was going to bar as they do not have IMEI number or they have a fake IMEI number. Initially the deadline for the service providers ro stop giving services to such mobile phone users was till Jan 6 2009 but DoT got it extended till April 15 2009. Now as the month of April has started, DoT and the telecom service providers have pulled up their socks and come up with an aggressive 10 day deadline for mobile phones that have fake IMEI numbers or are Chinese made with no IMEI numbers. It seems that this time DoT is sticking to its recently extended deadline of April 15th 2009. But its good to see the aggressiveness of government agencies in India to curb terrorism. Though the telecom service providers were lax in their attitude toward these kind of mobile phones, they are now actively pursuing their subscribers to part with such mobile handsets and save themselves from getting disconnected.