Starlink India Tie-Ups: Satcom Complementing Telcos, Citi Report

New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) Starlink's tie-ups with Jio and Bharti support the view that satcom services will complement the telcos' existing offerings and ease concerns over satellite services posing a competitive threat to existing telecom firms, a Citi report has said.

The same argument, when extended, also implies that any concerns on Indus Towers are perhaps overdone, it said.

"The tie-ups support our view of satcom being complementary to the telcos' existing offerings, which should lift concerns of LEO satellite services presenting a competitive threat to incumbent telcos," according to the brokerage report.

"By extension, this also implies that any concerns on Indus are perhaps overdone," it added.

Over the past few months, telecom operators and satellite firms have been sparring over how satcom spectrum should be granted. Then, in a surprising turn of events, Bharti Airtel and Jio Platforms announced this week that they have signed separate deals with Elon Musk's SpaceX to bring Starlink satellite internet services to India.

"To recap, we believe the implications for the two telcos are the tie-ups with Starlink would enable both Jio and Bharti to offer telecom services (albeit a premium offering) to a section of the population in remote parts of India that is currently under-served. This would also enable both telcos to expand B2B (business to business) connectivity and related offerings to enterprises and businesses in these areas that are otherwise lacking in fibre/FWA connectivity," Citi said in its report.

On Wednesday, Jio Platforms announced it has struck a deal with SpaceX to bring Starlink's broadband internet services to India. The deal with Musk - widely seen as the right-hand-man of US President Donald Trump - comes a day after telecom tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal's Bharti Airtel signed a similar pact with the US firm. The agreements are subject to SpaceX receiving its own authorisations to sell Starlink in India.

Over the past few months, rivals Jio and Airtel banded together to demand an auction for awarding spectrum for satellite services in India as they feared an administrative allocation would give Musk airwaves at a price lower than what they had paid via past auctions to set the sprawling terrestrial networks.

In November 2024, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel had clashed with Starlink at Trai's open house discussion on what should be the rules of the game for entering India's lucrative satcom market.

Telecom operators made a spirited pitch for a level playing field among the "competing" and "substitutable services" even as satcom companies argued that justification for administrative assignment of radiowaves is "techno-economic".

Starlink, whose services are beaming into more than 100 countries, has been eyeing India's satellite broadband service market - a space that Deloitte says could reach USD 1.9 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 36 per cent.

Starlink has the world's largest constellation of low Earth Orbit or LEO satellites (7,000 now but eventually set to grow to over 40,000), and the mesh delivers broadband internet capable of supporting streaming, online gaming, and video calls. Typically, these satellites orbit at altitudes of around 550 km.