Telcos cast satellite Internet as threat to terrestrial networks; SpaceX mounts ‘passionate’ defence

Telecom operators and satellite Internet operators on Friday (November 8, 2024) engaged in an occasionally contentious discussion on regulating services like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper satellite Internet, as part of an open house discussion by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

Also Read: The race to provide exhaustive satellite broadband services in India

The discussion stretched for over six hours, during which telecom operators cast doubt on the wisdom of freely allowing satellite Internet services to operate in India, and the latter defended their operations. 

“It is not a open and shut case of administrative assignment,” said Ravi Gandhi, a regulatory executive with Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, advancing a legal argument that the Telecommunications Act, 2023 does not automatically exempt satellite internet services like Starlink from having to participate in an auction to use spectrum. 

Parnil Urdhwareshe, a SpaceX executive, lamented “frankly unfortunate and entirely false allegations of possible predatory pricing” leveled against satellite internet operators. “We maintain absolute transparency on Starlink pricing and performance around the world, selling prices for any country are readily available on our website for anyone to check,” Mr. Urdhwareshe said. 

Mr. Gandhi expressed concerns on the growing capacity satellite services like Starlink would consume. “The public numbers which Starlink tells would mean around 35,000 satellites,” Mr. Gandhi said. “If we take India ‘s portion, there would be around 500 to 600 satellites always over India,” and up to 3,000 if multiple satellite constellations served the country, leading to more ground stations.

“I worry about where Mr. Gandhi is getting his numbers on Starlink,” Mr. Urdhwareshe quipped. “India accounts for 0.6% of the world’s surface area, which is an important factor in Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) systems which are global,” he added, arguing that “determining [satellite systems’] capacity in any one region is similar to saying that the majority of Jio, Bharti [Airtel] and Vodafone’s lakhs of mobile towers are located in an area the size of Nagaland.” 

Mr. Urdhwarashe argued that exclusive arrangements for satellite internet were counterproductive as players in that industry were incentivised to coordinate for extracting the maximum value out of shared satellite spectrum.

Calling SpaceX and other satellite firms’ submissions a “passionate and emotional outburst,” Rahul Vatts, Bharti Airtel’s Chief Regulatory Officer said that the demands for fair market access and non-discriminatory treatment were the exact same things that terrestrial telecom operators were also seeking. 

Mr. Urdhwareshe pushed back, saying that telcos’ stances amounted to “explicitly arguing that users [in remote areas] should continue to be stuck with services that either don’t exist, are too unreliable, or are too expensive. … We think Reliance and Bharti have done extraordinary work by investing in their existing networks in India and we would argue against anybody that said that was a bad thing.”

However, he added, “limiting user choice or punishing [satellite] technology” because it might endanger terrestrial network investments “is inconsistent with the purposes of … what the Government of India has been doing to finally enable satellite broadband for any underserved users who want and need it.” 

Mr. Gandhi dismissed this argument, saying, “Their plan is to connect the covered areas of urban dense areas where people can actually pay for their services,” and “not to connect to the 25,000 remote villages of the country.” Mr. Vatts added that “asking for similar conditions for a similar service is not impacting customer choice.”

Mr. Urdhwareshe argued that spectrum pricing for mobile networks was high because “you have to price in opportunity cost,” and that its value was “determined after 30 years of auctions and over a billion users in India served by effectively 4 operators. A rupee figure for the value of satellite spectrum in India today is not possible because no data for India exists with respect to next generation satellite systems.” 

“One way of solving this problem is by looking at satellite spectrum pricing in other markets around the world,” he said. “But I have a feeling that some commentators will completely disagree with that approach, because those prices across the world are uniformly very low.” He added that it was preferable to price spectrum for satellite internet through shared administrative assignment because the “value of that spectrum decreases when only some operators can access it exclusively, because its value is then only some percentage of these limited operators revenues,” while non-exclusive assignment would allow the government to reap revenues from all satellite operators.

Ambika Khurana, chief regulatory and corporate affairs officer at Vodafone Idea, called these submissions very “passionate” (as did Mr. Gandhi, who spoke after her), but countered that “we’re talking about a sector which has a CAGR of approximately 5% which doesn’t even cover inflation at this point of time,” and that “pricing is linked to market forces in a very competitive space determined by monetary value of services, future growth and innovation,” and that is the same lens to apply with satellite Internet.