On the policy front, the 17 March 2005 DoT directive sent a wrong signal to enterprises across the country. The directive has prohibited logical partitioning of EPABX for termination of leased line/PSTN/PLMN network. Technically, what it means is that the enterprises will have to use two separate PBXs, which means substantial costs and wastage of resources and foreign exchange. The directive will not be able to achieve what it aims to. Any customer having public and private networks on separated PBX but wanted to misuse the resources provided, it can do so by interconnecting and disconnecting the two physically, whenever a 'need' arises. And it would be almost impossible for the vigilance team to detect this. SMDR records in such cases are not kept, so the miscreant organizations can go scot-free very easily.

While in the case of logical partitioning of switches, the vendor (due to the software) ensures that there are no call overflows between the networks. Vigilance team can inspect all SMDR (CDR) records that are created including the origin of call, CLI, etc. Apart from this, there is also an audit trail that can be checked in case of suspected misuse. In a nutshell, while logical partitioning ensures detection because of tamper proof records, the requirement to keep two PBXs does away with any records.