India and the battle for satellites: The race for wider connectivity

Sly innuendos aside, the recent social media exchanges involving Starlink make a case for harnessing satellites to roll out connectivity more evenly across India

The barb-laden social media trail kicked off by SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s October 7 post  that blamed “certain oligarchs” for blocking his Starlink satellites from entering India has set off a timely debate on how to develop India’s already-frenetic mobile telephone market even further. 

Timely because Reliance Industries Ltd, whose chairman Mukesh Ambani was later named by Musk as the “oligarch” he had in mind, is headed for a ₹30,213 crore listing of its subsidiary Jio Platforms Ltd. 

The posts by the world’s first trillionaire entrepreneur signalled the need to flesh out two important ingredients of India’s communication and inclusive growth ambitions — suitable technologies and competition.

 The social media posts were sparked by a user who argued India urgently needed Starlink satellites because thousands of its villages were without 4G wifi networks.

 According to Lauren Dreyer, who looks after Starlink business operations at SpaceX, the company is ready to serve India the moment it gets the green signal. Starlink had been ready for five years, having built 20 gateway sites with hundreds of antennae and controls in place to keep Indian user-data inside the country. 

“We are ready to help Prime Minister Modi achieve his vision of 100 per cent connectivity throughout India — a vision all of our company, including Elon, shares,” she told the India Mobile Congress. 

The government in its defence denied allegations of bias, saying telecom licences had been granted to three mobile satellite services— Starlink, Bharti Enterprises-backed Eutelsat OneWeb and Reliance’s Jio Satellite Communications. Security assessments were underway and, once granted, the firms could seek spectrum. Telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia added that Amazon LEO, formerly known as Project Kuiper, was also eyeing an India entry. 

Sunil Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises, the largest shareholder in the Eutelsat group, the merged entity of French satellite major Eutelsat and the UK’s OneWeb, weighed in saying he, too, was waiting for approvals from the government. 

Musk wouldn’t back down: “There are many areas of India, as there are in all countries, with no Internet access, which denies children the opportunity for education and for small businesses the opportunity to sell their goods to a global market. Starlink would change their lives for the better.” 

“Ambani’s profits will be lower, but he is not going out of business. And, obviously, if Starlink is too expensive in India, no one will buy it, so SpaceX will need to make pricing affordable,”  he said in yet another post. 

That’s the story of the tug-of-war which now appears to have quietened down.

 Satcom, mobile or direct-to-device? 

In its home market, SpaceX, meanwhile, announced an $8-billion deal to buy a nationwide portfolio of 800 MHz spectrum from the investment firm Grain Management, which included 14 megahertz of paired low-band airwaves, subject to approval from the US telecoms regulator. 

The impact on global telecom stocks was palpable. Telecom stocks fell across the US, Europe and Australia. In India, Bharti Airtel fell 1.44 per cent, Vodafone Idea 1.02 per cent and Reliance Industries 1.62 per cent. 

Telecom sector expert Parag Kar said Starlink’s existing satellite-to-phone service using 2 GHz spectrum works outdoors but struggles to penetrate walls. Adding the 800 MHz spectrum would solve that problem and make Starlink a real competitor to traditional telecom services providers. 

But analysts noted that without ground infrastructure or towers to propagate the 800 MHz network Starlink would not be able to offer its mobile service in any market. 

“This purchase of frequency, which will take months to be confirmed by regulators, is for the US only. The underlying technology would, however, be applicable elsewhere, if SpaceX or a partner could obtain use of similar low-band frequency,“ said Simon Baker, senior research director at IDC, specialising in satellite and non-terrestrial connectivity. 

In India, Reliance Jio owns a major chunk of the 800 MHz band. And for Starlink, setting up a tower network on its own will mean spending trillions of rupees. But the possibility of Starlink offering direct mobile services to consumers will be a concern to Indian players, especially after Musk said in an earnings call this month, “We will be building out our terrestrial networks so that there's broad-based connectivity anywhere in the world that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate.” 

He added, “I think the demand for bandwidth is going to be dramatically higher than it is today. I think in three to five years there's probably a demand for 1,000x more bandwidth than there is currently, because AI or SI (super intelligence) agents will, on a per-agent basis, use far more bandwidth than a person, and there will be far more agents than there are people. So this ends up requiring a several order of magnitude increase in communication bandwidth in order to satisfy that communication demand.” 

“The strategic significance of Starlink’s spectrum moves is greater than the spectrum itself,” said  Akhilesh Tuteja, partner and national leader - clients and markets, and technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) at KPMG in India. 

“It signals an ambition to move satellite connectivity closer to the mainstream mobile ecosystem, particularly through direct-to-device services. That could progressively blur the boundary between a satellite operator and a telecom operator,” he said.

 Satcom scalability 

Interestingly, Jio Platforms Ltd, in its red herring prospectus, says satellite broadband was unlikely to scale in India because fixed wireless access offers fibre-like speeds at cheaper rates. It put Starlink's entry plans at roughly ₹4,800 a month in the US and ₹2,500-4,500 in most African markets — much more than what the average consumer spends in India. 

However, it also listed satellite competition as a key risk because satellite spectrum is allocated administratively rather than auctioned, which makes entry costs lower for satellite players than for terrestrial operators. 

If satellites scale faster or are cheaper than expected, Jio conceded, its fibre and airfibre offerings could become less competitive, and require additional investments. It argued that satellites were relevant for remote or hard-to-reach locations where terrestrial roll-out was challenging.   

The pros and cons of satcom were listed out for investors since Jio is in the process of developing its own constellation of 1,600 satellites to provide connectivity, especially in remote areas. The company said it may even enter into strategic partnerships with leading global constellation providers. 

“The Jio constellation will be coming late to the LEO (lower earth orbit) party. Starlink is already well-established globally and Amazon LEO is building up its satellite fleet. Other systems are being deployed or are planned, including from China. As a late entrant, Jio will face a competitive marketplace,” IDC’s Baker said. 

“Satellite will become more integrated into mobile service in the future than it is now, and this justifies launching service at this relatively early stage in development of direct phone-to- satellite technology,” Baker said.   

KMPG’s Tuteja said that while the Indian satcom broadband market will initially be much smaller than the mobile market, the comparison can be misleading. “The attraction of satcom is not that it will replace mobile; it is that it can reach where mobile economics eventually runs out. A smaller market by connections does not necessarily mean a less strategic market,” he said.

“In a country of India’s geographic scale, even that edge of the network can represent a significant market.” 

Starlink’s India dilemma 

Starlink first tried to enter India in 2021 by taking pre-orders before it had a licence, and the government told it to stop. It received its satellite licence in June 2025, followed by the space regulator’s approval and provisional trial spectrum. It is still to get security clearance, approval of foreign investment, and a final spectrum price. 

However, the challenge isn’t simply compliance: India wants satellite traffic from Indian users to be monitorable and controllable within the country, with the ability to restrict services in “emergencies”. Starlink’s satellites relay data among themselves

by laser, a design that enables it to offer its services anywhere in the world — services beamed from satellites are not constrained by political borders. This poses a security concern and makes compliance harder. Indian officials have also cited Starlink's role in conflict zones such as Ukraine and Iran to demand total control. 

“Starlink is unwilling to comply with regulations requiring domestic infrastructure,” a senior government official said.

To be sure, Starlink’s two biggest Indian rivals are also its partners. Both Jio and Airtel signed deals with SpaceX in March 2025 to bring Starlink to their customers, subject to approvals. 

RIL statement 

On October 16, RIL broke its silence on Musk. A day after filing the RHP, the oil-to-telecoms conglomerate said it “welcomed competition in satellite communications”, investment and innovation – homegrown or international. However, all operating in India must follow the rule of law, it said, adding its own satellite services await clearances.

Like Musk, Jio, too, cited the people of India. 

“Every player, Jio included, must serve the people of India and abide by the laws and policies of the land,” RIL said.

Musk’s response was a brief “Much appreciated”. But Starlink threw down the gauntlet anyway, saying it was “ready” — “ready to connect India with high-speed internet”. 

With Starlink planning terrestrial expansion and Jio gazing skywards, all that remains to be seen now is how this rivalry in the booming broadband industry serves India’s unconnected.