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Elon Musk's Starlink seeks licence for pilot ops
Formal application for the mandated licences would also be filed now and the process may be completed over the next few months, in case required conditions are met.
Pankaj Doval
NEW DELHI: Taking the first official step towards launching full-fledged operations in the Indian market and falling in line with local laws, Elon Musk's Starlink Internet Services has applied for a licence to begin pilot services. The move comes just days after the government advised the public not to subscribe to the services that were being advertised by the American company as it did not have the requisite licences to offer them.
The current application by Starlink is for getting an "experimental licence", which would help the company to carry out a pilot of its technology with limited set of subscribers, "but still with no authority to launch commercial services or on-board paid customers", a company source said. Formal application for the mandated licences would also be filed now and the process may be completed over the next few months, in case required conditions are met.
"The application for experimental licence has been filed, and this will allow the company to test its services. This will, however, not allow them to launch commercial services. That would require a GMPCS (Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite) licence, apart from other clearances by the telecom ministry and the department of space," another source said.
The plan of Starlink and other satellite-based internet services companies is to offer large swathes of bandwidth — with speeds as high as 1 GBPS and even more — through low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites that would be deployed at a distance of around 1,000 kms from the earth. The bandwidth would be sold to a variety of users/customers that will include business enterprises, railways, shipping companies, defence establishments, airlines, and telecom companies.
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