Consumer forum and NGO Telecom Watchdog, has called on India’s telecom secretary Anshu Prakash to stop the three global LEO satellite operators — Bharti-backed OneWeb, Elon Musk’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon and its Project Kuiper — from scooping up potential 4G/5G spectrum for free. It warned that any move to give these satellite companies access to spectrum potentially worth billions without auctions would flout a ruling of India’s top court, pose national security challenges and upset the level-playing field in the telecom market, reported ETTelecom.
“A number of deep-pocketed companies like OneWeb, Starlink and [Project Kuiper] have lined up to grab 4G/5G spectrum for free under the garb of providing cheaper high-speed satellite-based internet services to rural and remote areas, and all [such] attempts to get a back-door entry into India’s telecommunications market by satellite players and their lobby groups should be scuttled,” Telecom Watchdog said in a letter to Prakash.
The telecom NGO added that, “the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that all spectrum, or any other natural resource like [an] orbital slot used for telecommunication services, irrespective of being used in a terrestrial network as backbone or through satellite constellations, must be allocated through auction only.”
The letter comes just days after Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Mittal, who is also OneWeb’s executive chairman, said there’s no case for auctioning satellite spectrum.
“This is not terrestrial spectrum being used. It is not going to be used in every part of the country, but in only two landing stations at those specific points,” Mittal recently told reporters while speaking about OneWeb India plans, according to ETTelecom.
OneWeb and Starlink are working to start satellite broadband services in India next year. Amazon, which is also building a LEO satellite constellation as part of its Project Kuiper, has yet to disclose its India plans.
Telecom Watchdog, in its letter to Prakash, maintained that since these global LEO satellite constellation operators would cater to the same set of customers for same services, they “should be mandated to offer the services through the same licensing framework, complying with the principle of ‘Same Service, Same Rules.’” It asserted there’s only, “one legally valid mode of allocating spectrum for communication services, i.e. auctions, as established by the Supreme Court in the 2G case, and any dilution of this principle can lead to legal censure and a plethora of litigation.”
The NGO said any other method of spectrum allocation to provide 4G/5G services via satellites would amount to an “unauthorized backdoor entry” in the telecom sector; this would go against the established principles of “level playing field” for orderly growth of the telecom sector as envisaged in the preamble of the TRAI Act, 1997.
It added that both “5G and space-based communication technologies are now being developed in the same spectrum,” as in mmWave bands like 26 GHz, 28 GHz, 40 GHz, which implies that both the terrestrial carriers and satellite-based communication service providers will compete for the right to use the same spectrum.
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