28 November 2024
Reuters has reported that Reliance Jio has sent a letter to India’s telecoms regulator, asking it to review the potential reach of telecoms satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper before awarding spectrum.
Reliance Jio believes that the immense reach of the satellite companies will put them in direct competition with wireless operators, hence they should be subject to similar regulations – including attaining spectrum at auction rather than via direct allocation.
Allocating satellite spectrum directly is the norm around the world, but Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel had argued that the spectrum should be auctioned like traditional wireless spectrum because Starlink would be in direct competition with the mobile operators.
Reliance Jio notes that it currently carries 15 billion gigabytes of data a month in India using spectrum for which it paid roughly $23 billion over various auctions. Starlink, by contrast, would have capacity to carry 18 billion gigabytes of data per month, for which it would have paid considerably less. This would create an unlevel playing field, making the telecoms sector less competitive.
Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel have been making this argument in various forms for many months, warning that the introduction of Starlink could lead to aggressive price wars in an already challenging operating environment. Last month, however, Indian communications minister Jyotiraditya Scindia confirmed that the government currently has no plans to auction satellite spectrum.
The official decision was likely to be made before the end of the year.
India’s telecommunications companies are not alone in their opposition to Starlink. The Kutniti Foundation – an Indian think tank whose stated goal is to help India ‘develop an arsenal in the fields of Intelligence, Economic Warfare, Psychological Warfare & Soft Power’ – recently released a report calling Starlink a ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ given the company’s strong ties to the US intelligence services and the country’s military.
