Elon Musk’s Starlink to apply for India licence in January
STARLINK, the satellite internet division of Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, is set to apply for a commercial licence in India in early 2022 to provide broadband and other services, its country head on Friday (3) said.
Sanjay Bhargava, Starlink country director, India, at SpaceX, said in a LinkedIn post, ‘We hope to have applied for a commercial license on or before 31st January 2022 (unless we hit some major roadblock).’
If the company can roll out its services by the month of April 2022, it aims to have 200,000 Starlink devices in India by the end of next year, a presentation posted by Bhargava said. Earlier, the company said it expects 80 per cent of these devices to target the rural areas.
Starlink is one among the growing number of companies that are launching small satellites as part of the low-Earth orbit network to give low-latency broadband internet services around the world, with a particular focus on the remote areas that terrestrial internet infrastructure finds difficult to penetrate, Reuters reported.
In this mission, Starlink’s competitors include Amazon.com’s Kuiper and OneWeb which is co-owned by the UK government and India’s Bharti Enterprises.
Starlink has received more than 5,000 pre-orders for its devices in India but it is yet to begin any service(s).
The Indian government has also advised people against subscribing to Starlink since it does not have a licence to run operations in the country. It also warned the company against taking bookings and rendering services, Reuters added.
Starlink has stopped taking pre-orders for its devices, according to its website, due to ‘pending regulatory approval’.
According to the company’s filing, Starlink plans ‘to carry on the business of telecommunication services’, including satellite broadband internet services, content storage and streaming, multi-media communication and others.