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The Delhi High Court on Tuesday (February 25, 2025) refused to grant an early hearing on a plea for blocking access to DeepSeek, an AI chatbot developed by Chinese entities, in all forms in India.

A bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said there was no urgency in the PIL and it did not deserve a priority hearing.

After the petitioner’s counsel said it was a sensitive matter, the court asked him not to use the platform if it was so harmful.

“These kinds of platforms have been available in India for a long time. Not only DeepSeek but there are several such platforms available. Don’t use it if it’s so harmful. There is no ground for early hearing,” the bench said.

The court further held, “No case for an early hearing is made out. The application is rejected”.

Many things were available on the Internet for the entire world to access, but a person was not required to use everything, the court added.

The petitioner’s counsel sought the hearing be brought from April 16 to a prior date and said the matter couldn’t be heard due to paucity of time on the last occasion.

The court previously granted time to the Centre’s counsel to get instructions in the matter.

Petitioner Bhavna Sharma, a lawyer, said the plea sought to protect the personal data of citizens and the data in government systems and devices from cyber attacks and data breaches, and uphold its confidentiality.

The plea said within a month of the launch of DeepSeek application on play stores, various vulnerabilities were discovered in it, causing a large-scale leak of sensitive personal data online, including chat history, back-end data and log streams. PTI

According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications, security, networks, and data center industries, , the Optical Transport equipment market ended 2024 on a strong note, growing approximately 45 percent quarter-over-quarter in 4Q 2024. The market, however, declined by 13 percent in the full year 2024 due to customers adjusting for excess inventory and broadly unfavorable macroeconomic conditions.

“There is light at the end of this tunnel,” said Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “The Optical Transport equipment market entered a period of revenue contraction in late 2023 and looks to be exiting it in early 2025. The strong fourth quarter growth rate in 2024 is a great indication that supply and demand for Optical Transport equipment is near equilibrium, meaning the equipment glut is over,” added Yu.

Additional highlights from the 4Q 2024 Optical Transport Quarterly Report:

• 4Q 2024 had one of the best quarter-over-quarter growth rates seen in a fourth quarter. The sharp growth occurred not only in China, where there is strong seasonality but across almost all regions, including North America, which posted its third quarter of consecutive revenue increase. The Optical Transport market outside of China grew approximately 35 percent sequentially in 4Q 2024.
• The customer inventory correction that started in 4Q 2023 is behind us. Vendor comments indicate that order flow is increasing, and optical revenue in the North American region, where most of the excess inventory build-up occurred, is improving.
• The top five vendors in 2024 were Huawei, Ciena, Nokia, ZTE, and Infinera. Huawei held the highest market share at 33 percent, followed by Ciena at 19 percent. Nokia’s acquisition of Infinera has not closed, however, if they were combined, the joint market share would be 19 percent as well.
• Three vendors gained market share in 2024. Huawei gained three percentage points, ZTE gained one percentage point, and Cisco gained one percentage point. These vendors gained market share in most of the regions they supply.

NewsBit Bureau

Taiwan detained a Chinese-crewed cargo ship on Tuesday (Feb 25) after a subsea telecoms cable was severed off the island, the coast guard said.

It is the latest in a series of Taiwanese undersea cable breakages, with previous incidents blamed on natural causes or Chinese ships.

Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom reported the cable between Penghu, a strategic island group in the sensitive Taiwan Strait, and Taiwan was disconnected early on Tuesday, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said.

The Togolese-registered ship Hongtai was intercepted in the area and escorted back to Taiwan, the coast guard said.

The case was being “handled in accordance with national security-level principles”, it added.

“Whether the cause of the undersea cable breakage was intentional sabotage or a simple accident remains to be clarified by further investigation,” the coast guard said.

The Hongtai, using a flag of convenience, was crewed by eight Chinese nationals and had Chinese funding, it said.

Taiwan fears China could sever its communication links as part of an attempt to seize the island or blockade it.

“It cannot be ruled out that it was a grey zone intrusion by China,” the coast guard said, referring to actions that fall short of an act of war.

“The Coast Guard will cooperate with the prosecutors in the investigation and make every effort to clarify the truth.”

Flags of convenience allow shipping companies to register their vessels in countries to which they have no link – for a fee and freedom from oversight.

Taiwan has 14 international underwater cables and 10 domestic ones.

There is growing concern in Taiwan over the security of its cables after a Chinese-owned cargo ship was suspected of severing one northeast of the island earlier this year.

Separately, two ageing subsea cables serving Taiwan’s Matsu archipelago stopped functioning last month, with the outages blamed on “natural deterioration”.

In February 2023, two subsea telecom lines serving Matsu were cut within days of each other, disrupting communications for weeks.

Locals and Taipei officials suspected that Chinese fishing vessels or sand dredgers, which often drop anchor or scrape the seabed in Taiwanese waters, could have been responsible.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force to bring it under its control.

Taiwan has identified 52 “suspicious” Chinese-owned ships flying flags of convenience from Mongolia, Cameroon, Tanzania, Togo and Sierra Leone for close monitoring, the coast guard said last month. AFP

Video communication platform Zoom is looking to expand its data centre capacity in the country, in a bid to address the increasing demand of its clo ud-based phone system Zoom Phone, the company’s president of product and engineering, Velchamy Sankarlingam.

The company, which had two data centres in the country in Mumbai and Hyderabad, has now added six more data centres to manage Zoom Phone in circles – Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi. Once there is a demand for Zoom Phone in other circles, Zoom will look at expanding its data centre capacity.

As more businesses and individuals adopt Zoom Phone, the demand for servers and storage increases. This growth requires more data centers to ensure Zoom can handle the expanding user base without compromising service quality.

Currently live in Pune and Chennai, Zoom Phone is a cloud business communications platform, which helps businesses make and receive calls over WiFi, cellular data, with options to switch from video to voice call, from desktop to handphone, with various other chat and call management tools. It replaces traditional phone lines with a more flexible, internet-powered solution, allowing employees to communicate from anywhere—whether they are at the office, at home, or on the go.

“It (expansion of Zoom Phone) depends on where we see the demand. In these six circles, we have our own customers who have their employees in these locations. And if the customers have employees in other circles, we could expand the services,” Sankarlingam said, adding that besides Pune and Chennai, in all other circles Zoom Phone is being tested.

Zoom Phone operates on a seat-based model, which means you pay for each ‘seat’ or user that will have access to the phone service. Each seat, typically, includes one phone number and allows the user to make and receive calls through Zoom Phone.

In India, Zoom had launched its Zoom Phone service in October last year, after getting a licence from the department of telecommunications (DoT). With the launch, the company marked its entry into the cloud telephony sector, challenging the likes of call-centre solution providers, like Exotel, Ozonetel, Knowlarity, Twilio, and Zoom’s peers such as Cisco WebEx, Microsoft, etc. However, Zoom has an edge as it provides video, audio, chat, customer management, all at one-place.

According to Sankarlingam, Zoom Phone is getting good traction in Pune and Chennai, especially from multinational companies (MNCs). The same is because in India, most companies still use traditional systems such as private branch exchange (PBX), and would require cloud-based internet solutions.

When asked about the quantum of investments Zoom is looking at in India, Sankarlingam said, “There is a lot of equipment that we needed to invest in. So, it’s a combination of hardware, software, people, and resources, etc.”

Zoom, whose video conferencing solutions skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, has lately seen a slowdown in growth rate.

“Our growth slowed because pre-pandemic, we were like a $300 million company and then post-pandemic, we were like $4 billion. We grew 10 times during the time, which no other company has grown this fast. When you grow that much, your growth rate slows down,” Sankarlingam said, adding that Zoom’s revenue never declined.

Lately, Zoom has been banking on its AI offerings such as Zoom AI companion — its generative AI assistant that helps businesses summarise customer and team chats and gives meeting transcripts, language translations, compose emails, send calendar invites, generate post-call tasks for follow-up, among other things.

“AI is top of mind for everybody. And if you look at AI, most of the vendors in the market charge a premium for AI. They charge like $30, but Zoom subscription is somewhere in the teen dollars per month, but that includes all the AI capabilities,” Sankarlingam said, adding that the company has over 4 million customers who have adopted AI.

At the end of October, Zoom had 192,400 enterprise customers. For the full FY25, Zoom guided for a total revenue between $4.656 billion and $4.661 billion. Financial Express

An issue which left thousands of Virgin Media O2 customers unable to access the internet has been resolved, the firm says.

Downdetector, which tracks websites, showed more than 10,000 people reported their broadband was not working on Monday morning.

Users first began flagging issues shortly after 10:00 GMT.

“We have now fully restored services for all customers, following an earlier outage,” a spokesperson told the BBC.

The company had said in an earlier statement it was aware of some customers experiencing “intermittent issues” with their services.

The firm says on its website that together with O2, it represents more than 45 million mobile, broadband, home and phone customers across the UK.

It reported having 5.7 million broadband customers in October 2024.

While user reports to Downdetector have fallen from their morning peak, many Virgin Media customers have continued to flag connectivity issues on social media.

The Student Loans Company has told users on its social media accounts it is among those affected by the outage.

“We’re currently having problems due to a Virgin Media outage, this means we can only give general guidance when you contact us and you might have a longer wait time,” it said in a Facebook post.

It told the BBC it experienced “connectivity issues” which have since been resolved.

Virgin Media has declined to comment on the cause of the outage.

Its X account told one complainant asking for more information that it “rarely” provides information about root causes to customers.

In January 2024, Ofcom said that Virgin Media was the UK’s most-complained about broadband provider.

It has since improved in Ofcom’s standings and in February 2025 the regulator found it had fewer complaints than TalkTalk, EE and NOW Broadband. BBC

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is seeking to deploy Starlink satellite internet terminals to help accelerate an upgrade of the information technology networks that support the US Federal Aviation Administration’s national airspace system, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort raises questions about conflicts of interest for Musk’s business empire and the future of a $2 billion contract awarded in 2023 to Verizon Communications Inc. to upgrade the critical infrastructure, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Musk approved a shipment of 4,000 Starlink terminals to the FAA last week for the initiative, said one of the people. One terminal has already been installed at the FAA’s air-traffic control technology lab in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for testing, the person said.

The person familiar with the matter said the program will be called TDM X. The goal is to have the entire program fully functional within 12 to 18 months.

An FAA spokesperson confirmed the agency is testing one terminal in Atlantic City and two terminals at non-safety critical sites in Alaska. The FAA has been considering the use of Starlink to fix telecommunication connections to provide more reliable weather information at remote sites, including in Alaska, the spokesperson said by email.

Verizon’s contract supports the FAA in maintaining and upgrading its critical infrastructure, company spokesman Rich Young said by email. “Protecting Americans who rely on a safe and functioning air traffic control system is more important than ever,” Young added. “Our enhancements will help make that happen.”

A SpaceX representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Musk posted on his X social media platform.

The people said it was unclear how the use of Starlink terminals might impact the existing Verizon contract.

The push would extend Musk’s reach into the FAA, the aviation safety watchdog that regulates SpaceX rocket launches. Musk is overseeing a broad effort to reshape the US government under President Donald Trump, and has significant contracts with federal agencies. The FAA’s air-traffic control system manages 45,000 flights carrying almost 3 million people in the US each day.

Improving the FAA’s aging airspace network has drawn fresh attention after a deadly midair collision in January between a regional jet and a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. After the crash, Trump called current air-traffic control technology “obsolete.”

The FAA’s Starlink tests mark the latest inroads SpaceX is making with governments and businesses globally — an expansion that has been further accelerated by Musk’s greater political influence and reach. Bloomberg reported in December that SpaceX received a Pentagon contract to expand Ukraine’s access to a more secure, militarized version of its Starlink satellite network. Business Standard

In a major setback for television cable and internet service providers, the High Court of Bombay at Goa today has refused to grant interim relief to petitioner All Goa Internet Service Providers Association pleading to direct Electricity Department not to cut internet cables from electricity poles.

The High Court has adjourned hearing for March 18.

In its writ petition, the Association requested the court to issue an interim injunction restraining the Electricity Department and its Executive Engineer from cutting or disconnecting cables that provide essential connectivity to subscribers until the final disposal of the case. They assured compliance with a request for a concession on arrears.

The All Goa Internet Service Providers, on the other hand, assured compliance with the government’s directives by 31 January. The Electricity Department has estimated a loss of about Rs 50 crore due to non-compliance with fee payments by the operators in the last 2–3 years.

The government gave TV cable and internet service providers a new 10-day deadline in a public notification released on February 3. Following that, the Executive Engineers, JEs, and AEs in charge of the jurisdiction were directed to remove all unauthorized wires and infrastructure from electrical poles.

An earlier suit by the Goa Cable TV Networking & Service Providers Association, which sought relief against the removal of illegally constructed overhead wires, was denied by the High Court on January 22.

The department calculates that association members’ failure to pay fees results in a loss of about Rs 50 crore. The operators asked for more time to move their wires and consented to pay the expenses. A public notice was issued, a new ultimatum was issued, and a deadline of February 1 was first provided. Goemkarponn

Turkey has announced its adoption of DAB+ technology.

The country’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Abdulkadir Uraloğlu made the announcement on World Radio Day, Feb. 13, according to a release from the Turkish ministry. Representatives from several radio networks in Turkey as well as the country’s broadcast association were in attendance.

Uraloğlu said DAB+ will give the city of Istanbul 448 new frequencies, courtesy of multicasting. He said there are no more available FM frequencies in Turkey’s largest city. It is unclear whether the announcement means all new radio allocations in the country will be in the digital standard going forward.

Twelve Turkish broadcasters, both public and private, are already starting to broadcast with DAB+ in a test capacity from Istanbul’s Camlıca Tower, the minister said.

The networks include Alem FM, Best FM, Istanbul FM, Kafa Radyo and TRT-Haber, according to data from FMList.

Uraloğlu gave a speech on World Radio Day and he used the occasion to herald the country’s original adoption of radio. He said Turkey’s first radio broadcast occurred in 1927 from the basement of the Grand Post Office in Sirekci. “Radio, which undoubtedly changed the outlook of millions of people on life, was one of the most important inventions of the 19th century,” he said via an English translation of his speech.

The medium has played an important role over the country’s history since, according to the Minister, including during the 1974 Cyprus Peace operation.

“Radio broadcasting, in a sense, supported imagination and allowed you to dream. In this sense, it really has a special place and I think this will never get old,” he said.

Camlıca Tower, in service since 2018, has the capacity to broadcast 100 stations simultaneously from one tower, which the Turkish ministry says is a first worldwide. 98 FM stations, filling nearly every evenly-spaced frequency from 87.6 MHz to 107.8 MHz, broadcast there, according to data from fmdx.org. The tower stands 587 meters above sea level, making it the highest in Europe.

The minister also lauded DAB+’s efficiency. He said it will result in an energy savings of 90 percent and will reduce Turkey’s carbon emissions. He offered an example of one DAB+ transmitter serving 16 broadcasts via a signal frequency, using the multicast capability of DAB+. “Analog FM transmitters, on the other hand, use a separate frequency and transmitter for each broadcast,” he said.

“We share with you the pride of starting a brand-new era with digital radio broadcasting,” Uraloğlu concluded in his speech. Radio World

French satellite service provider Eutelsat, opens new tab has successfully carried out the world’s first trial of 5G Non-Terrestrial Network connection using OneWeb’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, it said on Monday, sending its shares 9% higher.

Why it’s important
European telecom and space firms are ramping up efforts to expand internet networks with satellite investments at the core of the European Commission’s 10.6 billion euro ($11.1 billion) IRIS² programme.

5G Non-Terrestrial Networks, which improve and provide wireless coverage to remote locations directly from space, are one of the projects developed as part of the IRIS² constellation.
IRIS² will feature 270 LEOs and 18 medium Earth orbit satellites. The constellation is scheduled to be fully operational in 2030.

Market reaction
Eutelsat’s shares, which rose as much as 10.5% earlier in the session, were on track for their largest single-day rise in over three years as of 1036 GMT.
Shares of the Paris-listed company have dropped around 66% in the past year, leading to its exclusion from France’s SBF 120 index of Paris’ most traded stocks in 2024.

What’s next
OneWeb’s satellites were built by Airbus, opens new tab and used chipsets from Taiwan’s MediaTek, opens new tab and equipment from Sharp, opens new tab and Rohde & Schwarz to conduct the trial, Eutelsat said.

The deployment of 5G NTN is expected to lower the cost of internet access and expand satellite broadband for 5G devices, it added.

Context
Eutelsat is one of the main satellite operators selected by the European Union for the IRIS² programme.

The Franco-British group is piling up losses from its traditional geostationary constellation travelling further from Earth, as cheaper and smaller LEO fleets like the one owned by Starlink surge in popularity. Reuters