Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Eutelsat’s OneWeb and the SES/Jio plans for their satellite direct-to-consumer schemes might have an extra hurdle. Reports from India say that the government, which has been slow in issuing the necessary permits for these services to start, might now want to ‘cap’ or limit the number of subscribers they sign up.

The fear is that successes in satellite-delivered connectivity would mark a significant tightening of India’s nascent satcom regime. The worries stem from mounting concerns among existing incumbent telecom operators who fear that satellite players could use existing licences meant for broadband connectivity to make a push into the lucrative retail mobile market, effectively eroding telcos’ main revenue stream.

With all of the mentioned services increasingly ready to start signing up clients, this extra problem could stymie the potential market for satellite-delivered broadband.

India’s Economic Times reports an official comment, saying: “This basically means that the current spectrum allocation for satcom services will be given for a certain set of customers, and when the number breaches the mark, the terms and conditions for spectrum, including pricing, would be different.”

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Categories: Blogs, Inside Satellite, Policy, Satellite

Tags: d2d, india, OneWeb, Project Kuiper, satellite