A panel under the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has recommended that all the application servers and gateways that are used for machine-to-machine (M2M) services must be located in India. The panel has suggested so on the grounds of national security.

Further, the DoT panel has also recommended that M2M service providers (MSPs) should be jointly governed under the regulations of the specific industry vertical where such M2M services are deployed along with DoT.

As part of its efforts to manage MSPs, DoT will also issue separate registration guidelines for them. The registration will help the government monitor the operations of the MSPs and will be critical for national security. Further, DoT will outline a separate spectrum policy purely for M2M services.

M2M applications are an emerging area in the telecom space which allow for communication between wireless and wired systems. M2M use devices such as sensors to transfer information over a telecom network.