The Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology has further liberalized the guidelines for Other Service Providers (OSPs).

Do you remember quaternary and quinary sectors of Economy from NCERTs?

What are OSPs?

• These entities are business process outsourcing (BPO) organizations giving Voice based services, in India and abroad.
• The term Business Process Outsourcing or BPO as it is popularly known, refers to outsourcing in all fields.
• A BPO service provider usually administers and manages a particular business process for another company.
• BPOs either use new technology or apply an existing technology in a new way to improve a particular business process.
• India is currently the number one destination for business process outsourcing, as most companies in the US and UK outsource IT-related business processes to Indian service providers.

Main features of the liberalized guidelines

• Distinction between Domestic and International OSPs has been removed. A BPO centre with common Telecom resources will now be able to serve customers located worldwide including in India.
• EPABX (Electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange) of the OSP can be located anywhere in the world. OSPs apart from utilising EPABX services of the Telecom Service Providers can also locate their EPABX at third Party Data Centres in India.
• With the removal of the distinction between Domestic and International OSP centres, the interconnectivity between all types of OSP centres is now permitted.
• Remote Agents of OSP can now connect directly with the Centralised EPABX/ EPABX of the OSP/ EPABX of the customer using any technology including Broadband over wireline/ wireless.
• No restriction for data interconnectivity between any OSP centres of same company or group company or any unrelated company.

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