India’s government is proposing that satellite spectrum over the country will be assigned without would-be operators having to bid for the bandwidth.

This rule, if enabled, will be a major advantage for the likes of Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Eutelsat/OneWeb and Elon Musk’s SpaceX/Starlink. The proposed Bill was tabled for approval in India’s parliament on December 18th.

However, if the satellite operators are understandably enthusiastic, the decision could be bad news for India’s giant telcos including Reliance Jio. Reliance Jio is the nation’s biggest telco with some 462 million subscribers.

Jio has lobbied for an auction of the spectrum and argued that each of the satellite operators would end up offering voice as well as data and broadband services and thus pose a threat to the established terrestrial players.

“By bypassing traditional auctions, this pragmatic method is poised to expedite the deployment of satellite services more efficiently,” said Anil Prakash, Director General at SIA-India, a satellite industry body.

India’s satellite broadband service market is expected to grow 36 per cent a year to reach $1.9 billion by 2030, according to a study from analysts at Deloitte.

Reliance Jio has a satellite joint-venture in place with Luxembourg’s SES. The j-v (Jio 51 per cent/SES 49 per cent) is designed to deliver fast broadband connectivity via satellite. The plan is to use the SES mPOWER fleet to serve India connectivity.

Other posts by Chris Forrester:

1. Virgin Galactic in stock split
2. Thuraya-3 suffers major problem
3. AST SpaceMobile hit by Class Action
4. Optimism under threat at SES
5. Rivada visits Terran Orbital’s manufacturing HQ
6. Avanti wins spectrum debt obligation case
7. SpaceX breaks records for re-use launchers
8. IRIS2 already in trouble?
9. Intelsat contemplates next steps

Categories: Blogs, Inside Satellite, Satellite

Tags: india, Project Kuiper, Reliance Jio, satellite broadband, starlink