Ambani versus Mittal: The war in the skies is now spreading to space
Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, is now reaching new frontiers. In what seems to be a step ahead of Jio, Bharti-backed low earth orbit (LEO) satellite firm OneWeb India has been granted the necessary regulatory approvals from the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) to launch Eutelsat OneWeb's commercial satellite broadband services in India.
Eutelsat OneWeb is a subsidiary of Eutelsat Group, global leader in satellite communications (satcom) delivering connectivity and broadcast worldwide.
The Group was formed through the combination of France's Eutelsat and OneWeb in 2023. OneWeb, which has recently completed a merger with France’s Eutelsat, has become the first entity in India to be granted the approval from IN-SPACe.
Any entity which wants to offer satcom services in India must get approvals from IN-SPACe, a global mobile personal communication by satellite services (GMPCS) licence and spectrum from the DoT. OneWeb has already been granted a license and now the nod from IN-SPACe has been received.
After mobility, broadband-from-space services could be the next big battlefield between entities led by billionaire industrialists Mukesh Ambani who owns Jio Satellite and Sunil Mittal, whose Bharti Enterprises owns a majority stake in OneWeb.
They will be pushed by the likes of Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, all of whom are trying to launch services quickly to get a first-mover advantage.
While OneWeb has its own constellation of GEO (geostationary) and LEO (low earth orbit) satellites, Jio has partnered Luxembourg SES Satellites, which has a combination of GEO and MEO (medium earth orbit) satellites in its constellation. Last year, Mukesh Ambani-owned Jio Platforms and
