Elon Musk said in June that he was “looking forward” to bring Starlink to India. And now he is likely to be able to do just that, thanks to a bill passed in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) on December 20 and in the Rajya Sabha (upper house) on December 21.
Under the new telecom law, India will allow spectrum allocation for satellite-based services without requiring participation in auctions. Instead, the players will go through an “administrative process.”
This move will allegedly benefit such as Starlink, as well as competitors including OneWeb and Amazon’s Kuiper, which have lobbied against the auction routearguing that auctions increasing costs and delaying investments. Their position, in a nutshell, is that auctions make a low-cost option more expensive.
Starlink, with satellites providing internet connectivity in more than 40 countries, has been looking at the world’s most populous nation for several years now. It has even started taking pre-orders for its devices October 2021. But a month later, India’s telecom department said Starlink a license is missing in the country, registrations stop in their tracks.
Musk probably cheers on the new bill, which replace two nearly century-old bills of exchange– the Indian Telegraph Act enacted in 1885 and the Wireless Telegraph Act of 1933 – but it was met with some backlash at home. Activists say it gives the Narendra Modi-led government unprecedented power to control telecom services and networks, including monitoring traffic data and intercepting communications under the pretext of national security interests.
Company of interest: Reliance Jio
India’s richest man has locked horns with the world’s richest man over satellite broadband.
As the global heavyweights rallied against an auction system, Reliance Jio, the telco arm of Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate, was in favor of auctions. The company said an auction system would maintain a Level playing field as foreign satellite service providers offer voice and data services, directly challenging traditional telcos – and without them, the foreign firms are poised for “runaway success,” like Amazon in India’s e-commerce market.
Jio is particularly interested in fending off competition after it has launched its own JioSpaceFibre in late October.
Satellite Internet in India, by the numbers
140+: Opposition MPs who faced suspension when the bill was passed.
5000: Pre-orders Musk’s Starlink received for its devices starting in January 2022, which it had to refund as it struggled to obtain regulatory licenses.
200,000: Starlink terminals the company hoped to have for India by the end of 2022, based on a commercial rollout starting in April 2022, according to a presentation shared by Starlink’s then India head Sanjay Bhargava on LinkedIn
2: Firms with a Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS) license from the Department of Telecommunications—Jio and Bharti Airtel support OneWebwhich merged with the French firm Eutelsat in September
4: Remote cities across India in which JioSpaceFibre is now available. These include Gir in Gujarat, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Nabarangpur in Odisha, and OMGC-Jorhat in Assam
47: Part of the 64 submissions made to TRAI asking for a non-auction route for the spectrum allocation. One dozen respondents, including Jio, voted for an auction.
Citable: The Indian government’s increasing control over India’s internet
“If Internet services are included in the law’s scope, the various worrisome requirements related to surveillance, possession, suspension, authorization, etc. also applied to those services, which deepens the threats to our rights and freedoms. To avoid expansion or reinterpretation of the scope in the future, the definition of telecommunications and telecommunications services, in the bill itself, should expressly exclude Internet services.”
—Internet Freedom Foundation December 20 statement on the new account
