The country's premier scientific body today entered into a memorandum of understanding with DoT for synchronising the telecom network with Indian Standard Time to efficiently handle cyber-related events in the country.
The MoU was signed between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research - National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL) and the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) on knowledge sharing for establishing a nationwide time stamping and time synchronisation network.
"The primary purpose of synchronising the telecom network with the IST time stamp is to enable the security agencies to overcome the difficulty in analysing and correlating the cyber events in this era of greatly increasing network speed with advancement of telecom technology (2G to 3G to 4G to 5G etc.)," said a government statement.
The implementation of the project will also improve the telecom network efficiency by reducing packet loss due to reduced slips in better synchronised digital network," the statement said.
Girish Sahni, DG, CSIR and Secretary, DSIR, on the occasion said the time set on Indian telecom networks should be in the IST zone to uniquely identify the user (subscriber) of network on tracing of the IP address and other parameters.
Presently, the telecom service provider and the Internet service provider are taking the reference time from different sources such as Global Positioning System (GPS), he pointed out.