Rollout ring

New Delhi, April 23: Tata Teleservices has decided to offer BlackBerry services without waiting for government permission.

This follows progress in the government’s talks with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) — the government has asked RIM to create for a year a mirror image of emails and store them in the servers of the Indian operators who offer this service.

Earlier, the department of telecom (DoT) had told the company not to offer the service till a monitoring system was in place.

However, with such a system emerging, the Tatas believe they can start work on the rollout.

Telecom rules require a company informing the government before offering value added services such as the BlackBerry. There is no obligation, however, to wait for the government’s approval before starting the service.

In a letter to the DoT, the company had said: “We are proceeding with the rollout of BlackBerry services and undertake that whatever solution is arrived at by the government through its deliberations with the BlackBerry suppliers and the operators currently offering such services will be applicable to us also, in the manner that it is made applicable to the other operators.”

Tata Teleservices also said that “various operators have been offering BlackBerry services to their customers since a number of years. However, TTSL (Tata Teleservices) has got stranded after we applied for a clearance, resulting in a significant loss of business opportunity and recurring revenues for last quite a few months.”

It was only after Tata Teleservices sought permission to launch BlackBerry did the government realise that there was no system to monitor messages sent by one BlackBerry user to another.

DoT had, therefore, denied Tata Teleservices permission to start the service.