With mobile subscriber base growing exponentially posing serious security concerns, the government today asked operators to ramp up their network capacity to meet the demand for lawful interception of calls.

Union Home Secretary G K Pillai and Telecom Secretary R Chandrashekhar held a close-door meeting with the leading telecom service providers, including Bharti, Vodafone and Idea and asked them to ensure that they provide enough network capacity to the government for interception.

This is important in view of increasing number of service providers and growth in the number of calls made. On an average there are 12-13 operators in each circle.

The two secretaries have asked the operators to give compliance report by April 2 on network capacity.

Recently, some of telecom operators had increased the interception capacity of their servers to 5,000 and the government had asked them to increase it further as and when the tele-density of the operators increased.

They also discussed introduction of Location Based Service (LBS) in order to help the security agencies in nabbing a suspected person in real time. The government also wishes that the telecom companies put in a system under which a handset without an International Mobile Equipment Identity, was not registered with the system.

The government has also asked the telecom companies selling broadband wave length to keep the track of the Internet protocol addresses.