A battle of the billionaires is shaping up over India’s skies, but Elon Musk appears to be pulling ahead.
The Indian government has said that it will allocate satellite spectrum instead of auctioning it. Elon Musk had been in favour of such a process of allocation, which would allow his Starlink service to begin operations in India, while Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance had called for an auction of the spectrum. Musk had also snarkily hinted on X about how Mukesh Ambani was afraid of Starlink’s entry into India.
The government’s decision to allocate satellite spectrum comes a day after Elon Musk had said that auctioning the spectrum would be “unprecedented”. “That would be unprecedented, as this spectrum was long designated by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) as shared spectrum for satellites,” Musk had written on X in response a news story about Reliance having written to TRAI to auction spectrum instead.
Reliance had earlier challenged TRAI’s consultation process over the allocation of satellite spectrum, which had followed the Telecom Bill of 2023 which had proposed allocating spectrum. Reliance had said that TRAI had “pre-emptively interpreted” that allocation was the way forward, and requested the process be started afresh. “TRAI seems to have concluded, without any basis, that spectrum assignment should be administrative,” Reliance’s senior regulatory affairs official Kapoor Singh Guliani had written in the letter to India’s telecoms minister Jyotiraditya Scindia.
Reliance does seem to have a solid argument to demand the auction of spectrum. Reliance contends that the spectrum for telecom waves had been auctioned, and Jio and other telecom companies had paid a hefty price to be able to acquire it. Now if satellite spectrum is simply given away by the government to companies for free, it will allow satellite companies like Starlink to launch their own internet services at a much lower cost, and outcompete telecom players. Reliance, thus, had been pushing for an auction in order to give telecom companies a level playing field with satellite internet providers.
Elon Musk, however, had contended that global regulations, such as those followed by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a U.N. agency for digital technology, require satellite spectrum to be allocated to companies. India is a member of the ITU and signatory to its treaty that regulates satellite spectrum, and it advocates that allocation must be done “rationally, efficiently and economically” as it’s a “limited natural resource”.
It appears that India has now sided with Elon Musk, and decided to simply allocate spectrum to companies. But there seems to have been sufficient bad blood created between Musk and Ambani — before the Indian government’s decision yesterday, Musk had responded to a meme which showed Mukesh Ambani recoiling in fear from a rabbit that was meant to be Starlink. “I will call and ask if it would not be too much trouble to allow Starlink to compete to provide Internet services to the people of India,” Musk had commented on the meme.
Musk had also today responded to the Indian government’s move to allocate spectrum. “Much appreciated! We will do our best to serve the people of India with Starlink,” he had posted on X.
But the story might not quite be over yet. Airtel’s Sunil Mittal has also come out against the allocation of the spectrum without an auction, and along with Mukesh Ambani he could create a pressure group to get the government to rethink its stand. Also, Starlink’s India entry might not be straightforward — Elon Musk has struggled to bring his companies to India, and after years of trying, Tesla still hasn’t been able to negotiate an entry into the country. And the Indian government might not be particularly big fans of Musk at the moment — after announcing last year that he’d be coming to India, likely to sign a deal over Tesla’s India entry, he had pulled out at the last minute, and visited China instead. It remains to be seen how these satellite spectrum wars will play out, but with memes on X and letters to regulators, tensions between Musk and Ambani already seem to be coming to a head.