Geopolitical convergence on terrestrial broadcasting

Both ATSC 3.0 for BPS in the US and D2M in India have the potential to deliver communications of national importance during crises and disasters independent of satellite systems and cellular telephony

On March 27, 2019, as India was heading into general elections, a special address to the nation by Prime Minister Narendra Modi caught the attention of geopolitical observers across the globe. India had successfully tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon as part of a programme labelled “Mission Shakti” as a deterrent against threats to our critical satellite infrastructure.

It is interesting that five years on as we head into the general elections once again, anti-satellite technology has become the focus of geopolitical conversations. The vulnerability of satellites to geopolitical conflicts raises a critical need for multiple strategic technology alternatives for what have become everyday applications from geospatial positioning to broadcasting and now even the Internet.

India’s technology trajectory over the decades has been unique and distinctive from most of the advanced West and perhaps even China. In India, we have seen tech evolution happen in leaps and bounds where we have often skipped intermediate steps of incremental evolution. In the case of telephony, the leapfrog to cellular phones has not only connected more than a billion citizens but also paved the way for one of the largest markets for mobile devices in its scale. Similar has been the trajectory of TV with the leapfrog to satellite television that rendered the terrestrial broadcasting infrastructure redundant and obsolete while paving the way for one of the most competitive broadcast media markets with over 800 satellite channels. With some of the lowest price points for mobile data in the world, India’s leapfrog within the digital economy has again been along a unique and distinctive path not weighed down by legacy business models, thus giving it the agility necessary to introduce innovations at scale.

While the leapfrog strategy has enabled India to rapidly develop its digital public goods, it has also increased the dependence of a sizeable part of the economy on these goods, significantly necessitating the need for a strategic fallback. Recent experiences from global crises have reinforced this need in a wide range of areas from hi-tech supply chains to critical infrastructure for communication.

As an example, the recently launched satellite services such as Starlink that enable satellite-based direct-to-mobile (D2M) connectivity for both telephony and the internet have emerged as a strategic fallback to terrestrial broadband internet as was evident during the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Similarly, during the general lockdowns of Covid-19 pandemic when schools remained closed and teaching shifted to online classrooms, satellite-based free-to-air television through DD-Free Dish in India played the role of a strategic fallback enabling students without internet access to continue to receive education. Free-to-air satellite broadcasts have also played a crucial role as a strategic fallback during periods of restricted internet connectivity and mobile communications for reasons of maintaining law and order.

However, India’s reliance solely on satellites for broadcasting is a point of strategic vulnerability. A similar point of strategic vulnerability has also emerged in the area of geospatial positioning with almost all GPS applications being dependent on satellites. Recognising the need for a strategic fallback to satellite-based geospatial positioning is a recent update to the list of critical emerging technologies by the United States government. The update released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on February 12 outlines technologies that are strategic to the US both from an innovation and a national security standpoint. In the updated list that includes multiple technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum information among others is an entry that should be of strategic interest to India as well. Positioning, navigation and timing have been identified as critical emerging technologies in view of the strategic vulnerability of relying solely on satellite-based systems. While the significance of positioning and navigation as strategic technologies is well understood, the same is not the case with timing. A range of critical industries, from power grids to trading platforms, rely on accurate timing to carry out their operations and are dependent on satellites, making them vulnerable.

Underlying this common need for a terrestrial fallback to satellites in the US and India is an emerging technology with footprints in both countries that is poised to play a crucial role. The National Association of Broadcasters in the US, in cooperation with government agencies, is evaluating the effectiveness of the latest version of the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s standard for terrestrial broadcasting (ATSC 3.0) to develop a broadcast-based positioning system (BPS) as an alternative to GPS.

At a conclave held on January 16 in New Delhi, by Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and others, four secretary-level bureaucrats from the key ministries of information and broadcasting, telecom, electronics as well as science and technology made a strong case for D2M broadcasting to reach citizens directly on their mobile phones and other smart devices in the case of emergencies, disasters, and other situations critical to national interest. BPS uses a resilient portion of the ATSC 3.0 data frame that is received in deeper indoor locations and provides precision timing to servers and devices in energy, communications, fintech (think UPI), defence and other critical sectors, and BPS becomes the primary source.

These two developments within a span of a month across the world’s two largest democracies point to a rare moment of convergence on an emerging technology conceived in the US as ATSC 3.0 while being designed and developed in India as D2M, with scope for population-scale applications in either country. Critically, both ATSC 3.0 for BPS in the US and D2M in India have the potential to deliver communications of public and national importance during crises and disasters independent of satellite systems and cellular telephony.

Thanks to key reforms in public broadcasting after 2014, when Prime Minister Modi first took office, today India is in a position to show the way to the rest of the world on this critical emerging technology of immense geopolitical significance marking a possible rebirth for terrestrial broadcasting in the country.

The writer is former CEO, Prasar Bharti