Spectrum Auction: Jio Urges Trai to Ensure Fair Competition with Starlink, Kuiper

New Delhi, Nov 15 (PTI) Spectrum auction will enable local entities to compete with foreign satellite players who can potentially block entry of Indian companies into Satcom space in future, Reliance Jio said in a letter to telecom regulator Trai on Friday.

While opposing the proposal to allocate spectrum to Satcom players without auction, Jio said that Elon Musk-owned Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper combined Satcom bandwidth is more than the capacity built by all three leading Indian telecom operators over the years.

"Assignment through the auction will provide an opportunity for Indian entities to directly compete with foreign entities, who have blocked First come First Served based ITU (International Telecommunication Union) priority list, and plan their own constellation. In the absence of clarity and certainty of spectrum assignment/priority, no Indian entity will ever be able to launch its own NGSO ( non-geostationary orbit) constellation," Jio said.

The Telecommunications Act 2023 provides for the spectrum assignment to Satcom players without auction through administrative methodology, as the radiowaves allocated to satellite players are considered to be a shared spectrum, and believed that it is technically not possible to allocate dedicated frequencies to any single Satcom entity.

Jio said several stakeholders during an open house discussion (OHD) organised by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on November 8 explained that spectrum for mobile satellite service (MSS) is assigned on an exclusive basis, and therefore, the argument of shared mode assignment, which is the sole argument in support of administrative assignment, is not true in case of MSS.

There have been arguments that Satcom services will complement telecom services where there is no network coverage -- the same has been debunked by Jio.

The telecom platform said that the arguments by Satcom players like Starlink and Kuiper at the OHD have broken the "myth" that Satcom service providers will be given a preferred treatment because they shall be serving only the unserved remote areas in the country with no terrestrial coverage.

"Starlink, Kuiper (Amazon), and other major satellite providers have collectively acknowledged that their services will not only compete with terrestrial communication services but will provide comparable or same quality, if not better, of communication services, in all areas be it rural or urban and will directly compete with the terrestrial services," the letter said.

Jio said Starlink and Kuiper have more bandwidth capacity that can easily rival all three leading operators put together.

According to the calculation done by Jio, the company, along with its competitors Airtel and Vodafone Idea, has built a total traffic capacity of 23,012 million gigabytes (GB) while Starlink and Kuiper have a capacity of 29,091 million GB.

Jio said that Trai should critically examine the capacities created by these mega NGSO constellations like Starlink and Kuiper, wherein each satellite would be generating capacities of around 200 Gbps to 1 terabit per second.

"With such substantial capacities and multiple hundreds of satellites serving Indian geography by the NGSO operators, the capacities generated would easily
rival with those created by many terrestrial operators in the country," the letter said.

Jio said that Trai should recommend same same principles for the spectrum assignment as those for terrestrial operators to foster healthy competition, support innovation and "provide equal opportunities to compete on the basis of service quality rather than any regulatory arbitrage created in assignment of spectrum resources".

The telecom major said that any notion that terrestrial operators are afraid of competition and are pushing for auctions to block Satcom players should be decisively dismissed.

"We submit that terrestrial players like us don't fear competition, and in fact, it's quite the opposite. The entities looking to enter the telecommunications sector via satellite seem apprehensive about competing on equal terms," Jio said.

The Indian telecom major said that the auction must be a preferred mode of spectrum assignment for Satcom services (for both MSS and fixed satellite service) as it will foster transparency and equal opportunities among various operators.