Sky wars: India's satellite spectrum battle heats up

While Airtel and R-Jio are gearing up to launch satellite Internet services in India, the country's satellite spectrum allocation saga is far from over

- VERNIKA AWAL

On 27 October 2023, standing at the keynote stage of the India Mobile Congress in Delhi, Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Airtel's parent firm Bharti Enterprises, made an announcement that wasn't entirely expected. "By next month, we will be launching OneWeb's satellite Internet services," Mittal said.

Airtel, though, was beaten to the stand by cross-industry rival, Reliance Industries' Jio Infocomm. Earlier on the same day, Jio chairman, Akash Ambani, announced the launch of JioSpaceFiber, which would offer the same satellite-based Internet services that OneWeb promised.

While the announcements were potentially headlining, a few eyebrows were raised as India continues to deal with the bottleneck of how satellite spectrum would be made available to its customers. How, then, did the two telecom operators, which account for nearly 81% of all Indian network connectivity customers as per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)'s July 2023 report, announce a service that technically cannot be provided in the country?

THE STORY SO FAR

Satellite Internet, or satellite connectivity, isn't exactly new. In at least limited capacities and forms, it has been present in India and around the world for a while. But things have largely flown under the radar, for the lack of a better pun.

In fact, for the longest time, access to connectivity powered by satellites was very limited. Not only was satellite access tightly regulated, it was also prohibitively expensive for most entities. As a result, barring sectors such as government affairs, defence communications and other such niche use cases, satellite services were largely unavailable and unseen to the average consumer. Also, for the longest time, the only touch point for the average Indian consumer to use satellite Internet was through in-flight Internet connectivity on a few international air routes.