In fact, the Department of Telecom (DoT) is expected to issue a provisional licence to Iridium only on Wednesday, barely four days before the worldwide launch of the company's service.

According to DoT sources, the Iridium top brass and department officials started working overtime to finalise the terms and conditions for the provisional licence after the prime minister's announcement at Ficci's annual general last week.

It is obvious that the prime minister was not informed of the complications involved in starting commercial operations which will leave the country out of the service being launched worldwide on November 1.

After the issuance of the provisional licence, Iridium will approach the Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) for its approval to import handsets.

Interestingly, neither DoT nor Iridiumofficials are sure whether the commercial service can start even within the next two months. All that a source would say is that trial runs cannot start before December. The company will go in for trial runs after procuring the handsets.

There could be other grey areas affecting a full-fledged launch, sources pointed out. According to the terms and conditions, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is expected to fix the interconnectivity charges for the entire global mobile personal communications by satellite (GMPCS) services after the grant of licences.

With Iridium all set to get a provisional licence, the exercise will have to be hastened.

DoT has taken a view that unless a number of important issues including interconnectivity details are worked out, the company would not be granted a final licence to go ahead with the service.

There are a number of other terms that the department is anxious to debate in detail. In addition, Trai will have to determine the tariff structure of theservice and also finalise the interconnectivity scheme.

Iridium India is supposed to cover the Indian subcontinent region including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The union cabinet had cleared the GMPCS policy in August this year, after the DoT had awarded letter of intent to three applicants including ICO Global Communications. ICO has already marched ahead of competition by launching a global roaming service a few days back. The company hopes to offer a full-fledged satellite service early next year.

The Iridium project is perhaps the most ambitious global communications project ever undertaken. A constellation of satellites strung in medium earth orbit around the planet will carry the voice and data communications load of the service.

Insight:

Land lines block the sky: Iridium has a chain of satellites with footprints covering the entire world. With an Iridium set, it will be possible for a subscriber from Delhi or any other place in India to call London,Berlin or New York, or reach any phone in the UK, Germany or USA even via land lines in those countries. Obviously, Iridium has worked out interconnectivity arrangements with telecom authorities in different countries: with Deutsche Telecom in Germany or British Telecom in the UK, for example.

But this is not the case in India. Iridium has to tie up with VSNL, MTNL and DoT to penetrate the Indian telephone landline network. Besides revenue sharing arrangements, Iridium will also have to approach Trai for tariff approval (which on current indications will be fairly stiff). The grey area is the telecom policy which will be finalised only after three months. In retrospect it seems that the prime minister, while being earnest in his desire to get India into the global network, did not reckon with the nitty-gritty of interconnectivity.