With the receipt of the DoT clearance, Iridium India will be the first to offer satellite-based GMPCS services across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. ``Iridium India all along hoped and wished to be a part of the global start-up of Iridium services and our dream has come closer to becoming a reality,'' said Jaydev H Raja, managing director and chief executive officer, Iridium India Telecom said in a press statement announcing the grant of the provisional operating license.

With the DoT clearance, Iridium India will now proceed to obtain required permission to import handsets as well as necessary approvals to establish interconnection with existing terrestrial networks in order to conduct the much-needed subscriber trials, prior to commercialising services in India and SouthAsia.

Iridium which will be launched at 1300 hrs GMT (1830 hrs IST) on November 1, 1998 will be the world's first global, hand held telephone service that enables customers to make and receive calls from anywhere on the earth.

Iridium India Telecom is a joint venture between a consortium of Indian financial institutions and the network management group of Motorola Inc of USA. The Iridium system is a global wireless communications network that will combine the world-wide reach of 66 low-earth orbit satellites with land-based wireless systems to enable subscribers to communicate using hand-held telephones and pagers virtually anywhere in the world.