Iridium Issued Letter Of Intent By Government

Iridium LLC, the world's first global mobile personal communications system (GMPCS), was issued an operating letter of intent (LoI) by the Union government on Thursday. The LoI will now have to be accepted by Iridium, which will pave the way for signing an operating licence.

The LoI _ issued three years after the system was first proposed to the government _ is the precursor to issuing Iridium a licence to operate services in the country and is seen as a precedent to issuing licences to similar systems like ICO Global Systems and Globalstar, besides homebred systems like Subhash Chandra's Afro-Asian Mobile Communications and Reliance's GMPCS.

 

Sources said the department of telecommunications has specified a licence fee of some 15 per cent of the total revenues generated by the Indian operations of the Motorola-led Iridium.

If Iridium finds the licence terms acceptable, it will be able to offer its service in India commercially by November 1, the date set for the service's international launch. The launch was initially slated for September 23.

Iridium is a 66-satellite GMPCS designed to offer voice, data, fax and paging services to subscribers with telephones and pagers anywhere in the world. Competitors like ICO and Globalstar are expected to start services only by end-1999 and 2000, respectively.

A GMPCS comprises satellites with radio-footprints spanning the world; gateways handling such traffic in and out of countries and regions; and network management centres to handle the traffic and billing processes.

The LoI marks the culmination of work by a DoT team formed to draft licence terms and conditions for GMPCS which intend offering services in India.

The Union cabinet in August cleared the satellite telephony _ or GMPCS _ policy. Iridium LLC, the operating company incorporated in the US, completed the launch of all its 66 satellites in May.

Since then, the company has been testing its service in various parts of the globe successfully. The first experimental call was completed in July.

The Iridium consortium is made up of 17 investing companies. One of them, Iridium India, is a joint venture between a consortium of Indian financial institutions_led by Industrial Development Bank of India _ and Motorola.

The Indian company has invested $70 million (over Rs 300 crore) in Iridium LLC, the operating company of the project.