Pakistan has spent the past year announcing, retracting and re-announcing timelines for SpaceX’s Starlink, but the service is still stuck in regulatory limbo. In late March the Pakistan Space Activities Regulatory Board (PSARB) gave Starlink only a temporary registration.
Last week the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said a full license will not be issued until Starlink secures permanent registration and clears a new set of technical and security checks. For now, the world’s largest low-Earth-orbit (LEO) network can do little more than wait.
The disconnect is glaring when one looks just across Pakistan’s borders. Bangladesh approved Starlink on 30 April, handing the company a pair of ten-year operating licenses that allow immediate import of user terminals and ground-station gear. Dhaka’s caretaker government even secured a personal commitment from Elon Musk to switch on service within 90 days, part of a push to wire its coastal belt, haor wetlands and cyclone-prone islands where fibre has never reached.
Sri Lanka moved even faster, granting Starlink a national service-provider license last August after amending its 28-year-old telecom law. Although Colombo has since paused the commercial rollout pending lawful-intercept rules, the license itself remains on the books which is a proof that the island nation can pass enabling legislation in months, not years.
India, meanwhile, is taking a characteristically pragmatic route. New Delhi has held Starlink at arm’s length since 2022, but in March Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel both struck distribution deals that would stock Starlink hardware in thousands of retail outlets once a five-year operating permit is cleared. By partnering with local giants while capping license tenure, India keeps foreign satellite capacity in play without ceding strategic control.
Pakistan’s regulators say they are simply being thorough. The PTA insists it cannot convert the temporary No-Objection Certificate into a full license until an external consultant finalizes technical guidelines for LEO constellations; once that happens, Starlink must “re-apply.” Yet that caution has real-world costs: more than half of Pakistan’s 230 million citizens still have no fixed broadband, and fibre reaches less than a quarter of the country’s mobile towers. Every month of delay leaves mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan, Balochistan’s fishing villages and the flood-hit Indus delta on 2G or nothing at all.
The regional scorecard is therefore stark. Bangladesh now has a dated launch target; Sri Lanka already holds an active license; India’s telcos are stockpiling dishes; even Nepal is formally reviewing Starlink’s application. Pakistan, a nation that prides itself on fast-track “digital Pakistan” policies, finds itself the outlier.
The irony is that Starlink’s ground equipment is already designed to meet ITU and cybersecurity standards; the missing ingredient is not technology but paperwork.
Clearly, where there is a will, there is a way, but in Pakistan, it’s just delay.
Unless Islamabad moves from provisional clearances to a definitive framework, it risks watching its neighbours capture the economic upside of LEO broadband—remote-work hubs, precision-agriculture pilots, tele-medicine corridors—while Pakistan’s underserved districts remain in a buffering loop. The ball is back in the PTA’s court; the rest of South Asia isn’t waiting.