Auction to make Indian telcos competitive against foreign cos; Starlink, Kuiper capacity larger than local players: Jio
Spectrum auction will enable local entities to compete with foreign satellite players who can potentially block entry of Indian companies into Satcom space in future, Reliance Jio said in a letter to telecom regulator Trai on Friday.
While opposing the proposal to allocate spectrum to Satcom players without auction, Jio said that Elon Musk-owned Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper combined Satcom bandwidth is more than the capacity built by all three leading Indian telecom operators over the years.
«Assignment through the auction will provide an opportunity for Indian entities to directly compete with foreign entities, who have blocked First come First Served based ITU (International Telecommunication Union) priority list, and plan their own constellation. In the absence of clarity and certainty of spectrum assignment/priority, no Indian entity will ever be able to launch its own NGSO ( non-geostationary orbit) constellation,» Jio said.
The Telecommunications Act 2023 provides for the spectrum assignment to Satcom players without auction through administrative methodology, as the radiowaves allocated to satellite players are considered to be a shared spectrum, and believed that it is technically not possible to allocate dedicated frequencies to any single Satcom entity.
Jio said several stakeholders during an open house discussion (OHD) organised by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on November 8 explained that spectrum for mobile satellite service (MSS) is assigned on an exclusive basis, and therefore,
