The Indian Aviation sector has been promising wifi in its aircrafts for some time. With the entry of Elon Musk owned Star link through its collaboration with India’s two major telecom/data providers, Jio and Airtel one can say the Indian Aviation sector is close to realizing their promise.
“These collaborations (Starlink with Jio and Airtel) will accelerate broadband expansion and play a crucial role in enhancing connectivity across industries such as ports, rural enterprises, mining, oilfields, villages, and India’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZs), where satellite technology can deliver substantial value”, says Satellite Industry Association(SIA) welcoming the Indian collaboration with Star link. The SIA also pegs India’s space economy at $44 billion by 2033, with satellite broadband serving as a key enabler, quoting a projection by In- SPACe’s Decadal Vision.
In short, the country having achieved a whopping 94 crore mobile broadband subscribers and still having a 50 crores to cover its entire population, India is one of the fertile markets of data service providers. Satellite broadband services being a new kid in the block, the low orbit Starlink satellites find India an attractive market, though much depended on the regulatory regime which the government adopts. Reliance owned Jio, having established itself as the lead data services provider had already been in talks with many Satellite service providers to augment its bouquet of services. Many have approached the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO ) for low orbit satellites over India for cheaper and easy regulatory offerings of the satellite services.
For Starlink, the link up with JIO and Airtel, and in principal approval of the government for their operation gives them an early mover advantage. Many low earth Satellite offerings like Motorola’s Iridium for almost two decades had crashed due to the slow market openings in various countries. India being one of the largest markets for these companies, even a moderate market share adds up substantially to their global revenues.
As of now both Jio and Airtel may offer the services offered by Starlink through their vendor networks. Globally, Starlik offers two kinds of services, personal and business usages. For persons, it offers connections to home and also roaming over 100 markets across the globe. For business they offer Local Priority, for connecting across the country and Global Priority for connectivity across land and oceans. For the Aviation sector they have high speed internet in aircrafts. They also offer Direct to Cell services to areas to “eliminate mobile dead zones across the world”.
This service offering in India will depend on the regulatory regime which the government is yet to formulate. If the regime limits the Satellite services to remote and hilly areas or for corporate bulk usages of data services, it may not have visibility other than in the Aviation sector for the public. Even if there is an offering of Direct to Cell services, the per minute call cost around Rs 20, industry insiders maintain. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is yet to make its recommendations on these for the Government to take a final call on the licensing regime of the Satellite services. With the setting up of satellite gateway stations and teleports in India and a ban on local data transfers, security concerns of satellite services, a global seamless service to India can still be far away.
But both Jio and Airtel , as well as Star link have officially opened the use of satellite for the fledgling Indian broadband sector. Just as the KU band Satellite dish services for TV, these KA Band broadband services will open up a new spectrum band usage further for high end broadband markets. The SIA has been lobbying for administrative allocation of spectrum for Satellite technologies as against the auction route for the Telecom sector. The government as of now has ceded the demand of SIA and the telecom companies, who opposed the SIA move, were quick to the bandwagon with a quick tie-up. No idea when CAG reports a “presumptive loss” as in 2&3 spectrum allocation.
The Indian telecom and broadband market is dependent on its low tariff regime for its growth and the high coast satellite services cannot compete with the Telecom offerings and will end up providing for the high end users like Aviation sector or corporate sector, depending on the regulatory regime which the government is yet to finalise. Whatever the regulatory regime, Satellite based services are going to touch the lives of millions of people in India, with the entry of Star Link into India.
