SpaceX has received more than 500,000 preorders for its Starlink satellite Internet service and anticipates no technical problems meeting the demand, founder Elon Musk said earlier this week.

“Only limitation is high density of users in urban areas,” Musk tweeted, responding to a post from a CNBC reporter that said the $99 deposits SpaceX took for the service were fully refundable and did not guarantee service, Reuters reported.

SpaceX has not set a date for Starlink’s service launch, but commercial service would not likely be offered in 2020 as it had previously planned.

The company plans to eventually deploy 12,000 satellites in total and has said the Starlink constellation will cost it roughly $10 billion.

Building and sending rockets to outer space is a capital-intensive business, but two of the world’s richest men, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Musk, who is also the chief of automaker Tesla Inc, have invested billions of dollars over the years to make inroads in this market.

Musk and Bezos have sparred publicly over the competing satellite plans.

Meanwhile, Indianbroadcastingworld.com learns from government sources that telecom regulator TRAI has informally conveyed to other government agencies that it has no role to play in SpaceX’s Starlink proposed project that targeted Indians too for preorders.

TRAI was one of the organisations, amongst others like Telecoms Ministry, which was petitioned by broadband Forum India to look into the Starlink preorder promos in India on the ground that SpaceX or Starlink had not obtained any clearances from the Indian authorities for the proposed project.

Mid-April Economic Times newspaper had quoted unnamed government sources as saying that Department of telecoms (DoT) was assessing whether Starlink beta service would violate any existing Indian regulations, including provisions in the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, country’s satcom policy of 2000 and the Information Technology Act, 2000.

However, an unnamed official, quoted by ET, added that prima facie Starlink or parent SpaceX do not “immediately appear” to have breached Sec 4 of the Indian Telegraph Act as the American company is yet to start any telegraphic activity within Indian jurisdiction.