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India’s biggest telecoms companies, led by rival billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Sunil Bharti Mittal, are poised to launch satellite internet services as they challenge Elon Musk’s attempts to roll out Starlink in the country.
Bharti Airtel’s joint venture with Eutelsat OneWeb, the Anglo-French satellite communications group, could begin operations as early as June, and Ambani’s JioSpaceFiber is expected to follow later this year, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Musk’s SpaceX, the owner of Starlink, has been trying to enter the country for more than three years but has failed to get regulatory approval and was reprimanded by local authorities in 2021 for signing up customers without proper licenses.
During Narendra Modi’s visit to the US last year, Musk told the Indian prime minister that he was eager to bring Starlink to the country to serve isolated regions that have little or no high-speed internet.
Mittal’s company soon took the lead in India’s Internet space race. Unlike its competitors, it has received all the necessary approvals and can launch immediately once the new government allocates satellite spectrum after the national elections that ended in early June. Modi is set to rule in a coalition alliance after his Bharatiya Janata Party lost its absolute majority.
“Once you get a connection, people tend not to switch providers,” said Santosh Tiwari, a Bengaluru-based partner at consultancy EY Parthenon, which estimates that satellite Internet in India represents a potential $1 billion revenue market.
“We’re going to focus on the business-to-business Internet — that’s where most of the money will come from,” Tiwari said. “Sales Internet in these areas, this rollout may take longer.”
Bharti Airtel was in talks to provide internet to India’s army and navy in remote areas without conventional broadband services, one of the people close to the company said, adding that it had “a head start on the competition”.
Ambani’s Reliance Industries, which owns India’s largest telecom network with more than half of the country’s 924 million wireless and cable broadband subscribers, is still awaiting a nod from the nation’s space industry regulator IN-SPACE.
The full rollout of JioSpaceFiber, Reliance’s joint venture with Luxembourg-based satellite network provider SES, may be outlined at the conglomerate’s annual meeting. The meeting is usually in August, when Ambani is known to make a major announcement, one of the people said.
The product will serve as a “split second” offering among small businesses, while Jio’s main focus will remain on expanding broadband internet access across the country of 1.4 billion, according to another.
However, even if Ambani and Mittal are able to secure approval before Musk, it is unlikely they will ever be able to compete with Starlink’s network of more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites and SpaceX’s near-monopoly on reusable rockets with more than 100 launches. forecast for this year.
Starlink was well established and “could have taken off quickly” in India, the executive said, but “they don’t have gateways to the country, they are way behind”.
Indian local media reported in April that the provider had received preliminary approvals from the country’s telecommunications ministry ahead of Musk’s much-anticipated trip to Delhi, when he was expected to announce the establishment of a Tesla factory.
But Musk canceled the visit at the last minute and traveled to neighboring rival China. Since then, there have been no further updates on the approval of Starlink or the Tesla factory.
Bharti Airtel, Reliance, SpaceX, along with India’s space regulator and the telecom ministry, did not respond to requests for comment.