For a long time the story of digital connectivity in India has been a very down-to-earth one. A conflagration of fibre optic cables, microwave towers, and mobile networks has traveled the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent, tying up with millions of people.
However, in spite of its advancement, this terrestrial tale has very black spots. In remote villages hidden in mountains, poor fisher folk in tidal mangroves, and far-flung tiny villages of the Northeast, the internet is still fantasy, an unkept promise left by ground-based infrastructure.
Nevertheless, the next chapter is not being written on the ground but is a sky one. The upheaval is on another plane, 36,000 km away and it is set to change the entire game.
From Sci-Fi to Strategic Priority: The Satcom Awakening
It was science fiction that the earth’s lower orbit should be populated with numerous satellites in order to provide the internet via space that was the idea long ago. Also, only a few companies were thought to be able to afford such a project.
Indians were mostly illiterate in the field and while the India public was struggling with poor mobile and broadband connection, along came the world to take the middle ground on the matter of satellite internet. World-wild awakening of people concerning satcom connection in general and its character in the case of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg Elon Musk-based Starlink and OneWeb uprooted the myth that it was a hesitation not an awakening.
How long should India be a viewer while all the other nations and their industry players move ahead with their ambitious satellite programs?
India was not just a bystander but an active learner and it decided not to stay behind. It would not be merely a reaction but it would come from a deeply integrated element of the Indian story.
The exquisite part of the pandemic to the digital divide in India was its exposure. While middle class urban professionals were comfortably doing their work through Zoom urban schools, the hypocrisy of rural children became evident as they were driving up trees to catch a marginal cell phone signal far away studies.
The engineering and social cost of being disconnected were weighted heavily on society. State of the art communications transformed from an exclusive luxury item into a matter of a national strategic agenda, where the idea of a satellite network was no more enough to keep a citizen in the dark zones of the digital world.
The Government’s Gambit: Throwing the Doors Open
Taking this necessity into consideration, the Indian government played a daring hand. It replaced the extremely old satellite communication policy with a fresh one, thus paving the way for private companies to come to the rescue. The new Indian Space Policy specified the interactions between private companies, government agencies, and regulators with a distinct, liberalized outline.
ISRO, the government's arm, however, for long, was the lone player in the space race started firing the starting gun. As a result, it changed its identity from the sole player to the one who facilitates. As private companies are allowed to take up the challenges for launch, manufacture and provide services, ISRO is focusing on advanced satellite technology and the production of the foundation for the launch of the next-generation satellites.
This was the switch to a gold rush. The list of those who became interested is not only from the telecommunication sector, including Jio and Bharti Airtel (a major investor in OneWeb), but also encompass global players like Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
The Billion-Dollar Battle in the Stars
The competition exists and the approaches are quite diverse. On the one hand, the so-called Bharti Airtel’s OneWeb (currently renamed Eutelsat OneWeb) is betting on the B2B and government sector. The constellations are to be launched first to provide backhaul connectivity to telecom towers standing in remote areas; in other words, the existing mobile networks will be able to extend their reach without fibre being laid further.
Jio Spaces, on the contrary, is a collaborative project with Luxembourg-based SES. Jio dreams of going to the moon - not literally, of course. It is planning a hybrid model, which includes enterprise customers as well as, a little boldly, consumer market directly. Their commitment is to deliver high-speed internet through the use of laser technology to every place, be it a house or a company, anywhere in the country.
Also, there is the mysterious card: Elon Musk’s Starlink. Just after the incident when the regulator had asked the company for a refund of the non-authorized pre-orders, Starlink started its official path. The way they look at customers only, go with a thoroughly already existing domestic and international constellation of LEO spacecraft, which guarantees short connection times, and high rates.
This is not a competition for the most brilliant tech but who will be first to succeed, in the Indian market, where customers are already known for being highly sensitive to prices.
Non-Technology Challenges: The Problem of Cost
Technologies are ready to be implemented. Will govt assurance be clear? Players are at hand. What is the catch then? The catch is hidden inside a simple and widespread device: a satellite dish.
For satellite communication to become truly a service for the whole world, it should not be something expensive or for a special group of people. The user terminal, i.e. the antenna on a user’s roof, is currently the single biggest cost driver for this service, which together with the rest of the installation can go up to several thousands of dollars. The great Indian challenge is to bring this cost down to only a few thousands.
Innovations of such magnitude are happening in this place. Companies are hard at work creating smaller, cheaper, and more efficient customer premisis equipment (CPE). The goal is to have a plug-and-play device which is almost as easy to install as DTH and almost as cheap. The battle for India to be won lies in the hands of the one who wins the price fight.
The Village That Waited: A Story of Tomorrow
Envision a village in Odisha that is an unreachable place due to a river that becomes too big during the monsoon and for months it cuts the village off from the world. The school there has one teacher for five different classes. The health centre has no doctor, just a nurse that is explaining symptoms over a bad phone line to a doctor that is far away.
Picture a small dish that is put on the roof of the school. The school is then connected to the rest of the world by the internet. The students can pull up digital lessons from the best teachers all over the country. The health centre can organize a live video consultation, thus a doctor can examine and diagnose a patient from a distance. One local worker is able to thus sell her goods directly to the people in the cities without the help of the middlemen enjoys this way all over the world.
This is not an unreal or an impossible goal. It’s really difficult to accomplish but satcom is the one who promises to make it happen. It is not only about watching movies; people are watching the opportunities, education, health, and economic empowerment being delivered to those who need them the most, directly.
The Launch is Imminent
It is not that the satcom dream of India is just taken off; it is already away from the launch tower. There are many regulatory, economic, and social challenges ahead. Not only that but the collaboration between the government and the private sector has made a very strong launch vehicle performance.
The last frontier of India's digital disparity is not the earth. It is the area between satellites, and that distance is rapidly reducing. The link is on its way and it will be from the sky, not from the ground.
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