Does India need Starlink?

It was November 2021, and the Department of Telecommunications(DoT) issued a warning to Starlink India against accepting deposits for prebooking their service. Added with management changes, uncertainty around commencing their operation looms. This page discusses the use cases and hurdles for Starlink in India.

To kickoff, Starlink is an Internet service provider and a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX operating over 2200 LEO(Low Earth Orbit) satellites. Since these are closer to earth than traditionally deployed GEO satellites, Starlink can provide high-speed internet with low latency to its customers. Still, the service is running in the beta version but a full-fledged commercial rollout is not far away. Starlink 2.0 is currently being rolled out by the company.

Coming to India's scenario, let's get it clear that a terrestrial network is the best way to get an internet connection. Starlink primarily will serve those remote locations where conventional means of connectivity can't reach. So their target customer base is very converged. Now, India is densely populated which provides any operator the opportunity to capture more customers, which again incentivizes local ISPs to extend their service to the maximum area available leaving very less area uncovered.

Challenge for Starlink in India is two-dimensional, first to get a healthy customer base for generating adequate revenue, second part is that, since India has very low prices for data, current pricing($100/m) will not attract retail customers. Thus leaving them with a further narrowed target of remote-business units to use Starlink as potential customers to exploit.

Government tussle

Recently there has been a difference in opinion with incumbent operators with regards to leasing to spectrum for satellite internet. Jio wants them to auction like normal airwaves to ensure that they get the right prices and generate adequate revenue from the precious resources.

Whereas Airtel wants private allotment based on capacity movement.

It has to be noted that both have upped their sleeves in this game, Bharti's global arm acquired a major stake in OneWeb a year back and also has joint ventured with Hughesnet to bring their services to India.

On the other hand, jio has joint ventured with SES, a Luxembourg-based company to introduce satellite internet in India. Looking all along, interesting time ahead for the industry and we are up for some exciting announcements.

Tune to vaini.in for continuous updates on the progress.