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Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks
Satellite communications (Satcom) sector is going to blow up in India in the near future. The road is set, but the sector regulator would have to be very careful and deliberate about the policies it forms for the satcom players. Currently, two players have the GMPCS (global mobile personal communication by satellite) license in India – OneWeb and Jio Satellite Communications Ltd. OneWeb has already deployed most of its planned fleet of LEO (low earth orbit) satellites. In 2023, OneWeb is expected to complete its planned constellation of LEO satellites. A total of 502 LEO satellites have been deployed, which is 80% of the company’s planned fleet.
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Low Fixed Broadband Penetration in India is the Big Opportunity
Currently, the fixed-broadband connections have only be able to reach about 10% of the Indian households (via Ookla). This means that there’s still a very large part of India unexposed to broadband internet. Mobile networks are largely unreliable in India because of network congestion scenarios. Laying fibre is an expensive procedure and fibre can be easily damaged due to regular diggings, resulting in interrupted internet services. However, these limitations don’t exist with the satellite broadband.
While Starlink tried selling pre-booking connections in India, the company was asked to refund the money to customers and stop selling pre-bookings as it didn’t have a license to sell services yet. There have been no updates from Starlink since then. Maybe the company has put its plans to sell connections in India on hold. India is too big of a market for any company to miss out on, thus, it can’t be that Starlink isn’t planning something for India at all. But the company would have faced a big set back when its India head Sanjay Bhargava left the company.
