Starlink approved for India
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?
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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?
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
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4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“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.