In a fresh notice to telecom operators, Department of Telecommunications has asked them to enhance their existing capacity and provide call interception facilities of at least 480 lines at any given time to security agencies.

"The licensee should ensure suitable redundancy in the complete chain of monitoring equipment for trouble free operations of monitoring 480 simultaneous calls as per requirement," the DoT notice said.

The telecom department has asked telecom service providers to provide access to monitoring of mimimum of 30 calls simultaneously to each of the security and law enforcement agencies. Presently there are nine designated security and law enforcement agencies.

In each of telecom service area, DoT wants telecom operators to have capacity of monitoring total of three thousand calls. Earlier, telecom service providers were asked to provide lawful interception of 210 simultaneous call to only seven security agencies.

The government has asked telecom operators to provide all the arrangements and expenses related to engineering, maintenance and installation of hardware and software for monitoring of calls, which should be borne by the company.

However, government will bear the cost of designated user, hardware and leased line circuits from facility of telecom operator to the monitoring centre located as per choice of security agencies. It can be within the premise of telecom company as well.