Starlink approved for IndiaAfter several regulatory issues that blocked the company during the past few years, SpaceX has finally gotten approval to sell Starlink to customers in India.
The company hopes to initiate service within the next year. There still remain some required license approvals:
Although the licence from the Ministry of Telecommunications clears a major hurdle, the service’s final launch in India will depend on further regulatory clearances, including the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) recommendations on spectrum allocation, which are still pending approval from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
These should be pro forma at this point, since it was the ministry of telecommunications that issued this most recent license. Why would it issue one permit but then block another?
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
After several regulatory issues that blocked the company during the past few years, SpaceX has finally gotten approval to sell Starlink to customers in India.
The company hopes to initiate service within the next year. There still remain some required license approvals:
Although the licence from the Ministry of Telecommunications clears a major hurdle, the service’s final launch in India will depend on further regulatory clearances, including the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) recommendations on spectrum allocation, which are still pending approval from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
These should be pro forma at this point, since it was the ministry of telecommunications that issued this most recent license. Why would it issue one permit but then block another?
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“Why would it issue one permit but then block another?”
You know the answer. Someone hasn’t received their check yet.
This is a big deal. Even though the percentage of the Indian population able to afford consumer-level Starlink service is a fraction of that in the US and Europe, the total size of India’s population may render it Starlink’s largest market at some future point.
Indian foot-dragging, to this point, was motivated by a combination of decades-old reflexive Indian economic protectionism dating back to its socialist days, the still very much present “Permit Wallah” bureaucracy and Indian hopes of squeezing additional concessions out of Musk by using potential competition from the partially-Indian-owned OneWeb as “encouragement.” But OneWeb’s architectural limitations make it incapable of being effective competition to Starlink at the retail consumer level. Its cost structure and static network capacity also make it a doubtful competitor for enterprise-level service.
Building an Indian plant to produce 20% of the Starlink terminals to be sold in India turned out to be about as far as Elon was willing to go.
Further Indian dithering was, I think, short-circuited by a growing realization that other developing economies, whose nations had approved Starlink service much earlier, were proving more attractive places for foreign investment by those seeking alternatives to increasingly problematical former investments in the PRC. India never wants to depend nearly as much on export-directed manufacturing as has the PRC, but it does want at least some of that action. I suspect it was finding that Starlink availability to obviate any land-based or GEO-only-based telecom service restrictions on enterprise-level service was something it needed to have to stay competitive.
The only potential alternative would be to wait several more years in the hope that Kuiper could offer a better deal. That seems unlikely given Kuiper’s less-favorable cost structure. And there is, of course, that wait. India correctly understands that further waiting would definitely injure its competitiveness further and that such losses in the interim would totally submerge any possible cost benefits even were those likely to manifest – which they are not.