Last month, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio announced partnerships with Starlink to provide satellite-facilitated internet connectivity in India, probably speeding the conclusion of Starlink’s five-year journey to enter the Indian market.
The internet service provider (ISP) space in India is already hyper-consolidated, with Airtel and Jio accounting for 81 percent share of the market. Naturally, the duopoly has been apprehensive about competition with their services and investments. Notably, the two companies had already entered partnerships to make inroads into providing satellite internet in India. In 2020, the Bharti Group made significant investments in OneWeb; and in 2022, Reliance Jio created a joint venture with SES to provide satellite internet in India. Both initiatives had advanced toward getting regulatory approvals to start providing services to customers.
These deals follow Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the U.S., which included a meeting with Elon Musk, senior adviser to the U.S. president and the CEO of Starlink’s parent company SpaceX. Even U.S. President Donald Trump assumed Musk met Modi because the former “wants to do business in India.” The timing and nature of the developments have raised eyebrows within the political opposition in India, which alleges that the deals were struck under government pressure, ostensibly to appease the U.S. government.
Concerns about transnational crony capitalism are well-founded, and only part of the picture of why the Indian public should be concerned about Starlink’s entry to India. The deals may offer very little in terms of expanded internet connectivity, while creating a myriad of national autonomy concerns posed by the entry of a foreign company operating in a technically sensitive domain, particularly SpaceX, which enjoys a close relationship with the U.S. government and intelligence.
Unusual Deals and Unsustainable Internet Connectivity
Starlink primarily operates as a direct-to-customer service, with customers using Starlink equipment to connect to their network and the internet. Their offerings will remain similar in India. As part of its deal, Jio “will make Starlink solutions available through its retail outlets.” Airtel’s press release is more tentative, with the company only set to “explore” offering Starlink equipment in Airtel storefronts.
If a customer uses Starlink equipment bought from Airtel or Jio stores, their Starlink internet connections will never interact with the ISPs’ infrastructure, making this component of Airtel’s and Jio’s deals with Starlink quite atypical for arrangements between ISPs and satellite companies. In a more common arrangement – exemplified by the Jio-SES and Airtel-OneWeb partnerships – the ISP obtains bandwidth from a satellite internet company to complement the former’s on-ground or terrestrial network. In such cases, the connection to customers’ devices is managed by the ISP, which on the backend will rely on either the terrestrial or satellite connectivity, depending on availability and other factors.
The press releases issued by Airtel and Jio about the deals state that they will be “evaluating” and “exploring” how Starlink can extend the ISPs’ networks. While integration with terrestrial networks is not Starlink’s usual offering, they did strike such a deal with a Japanese ISP in 2021. Only the future can tell us whether, how, and when such an arrangement with Starlink will concretize for Airtel and Jio, possibly consigning the two telecom giants to retail and support service for Starlink equipment in the meanwhile.
Direct-to-consumer satellite internet access, which Starlink provides, in general carries high costs and multiple negative externalities.
For one, Starlink and other such providers rely on low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. To service customers around the world reliably and directly, Starlink needs to maintain a massive constellation. Starlink currently has over 7,000 satellites in orbit; compare this to the total of 127 satellites launched by Indian entities ever. Given that the average lifespan of a Starlink satellite is five years, there are extremely high costs of just operating the constellation, and SpaceX has announced its plans to maintain 12,000, and in the future even 30,000, satellites. This makes the costs – if not subsidized heavily – untenable as a major part of internet connectivity programs in most developing nations. Even internal U.S. government calculations indicate that satellite internet access will be costlier in the long run than other programs.
The sheer number of satellites also means increased debris and chances of collisions in space, and significant disruption of the work of astronomers.
As expert on internet connectivity Steve Song highlighted, satellite internet services that provide wholesale bandwidth to ISPs and community networks – particularly if they operate in middle Earth or geosynchronous orbits – require smaller constellations, limit many of these environmental concerns, and can foster local participation and economies.
U.S. Surveillance and Indian Sovereignty
Analyzing the national security aspects of Starlink’s into India, both the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Indian government and the Indian National Congress expressed concerns around whether the company would disable internet connectivity if the government of the day demanded it. These arguments betray not only a disregard for human rights enabled by internet connectivity, but also a shallow understanding of Starlink’s pervasive surveillance and close ties with U.S. intelligence.
U.S. intelligence runs an expansive surveillance program legally justified under their Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA Section 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies a near-unfettered power to surveil the communication of non-U.S. nationals. The U.S. intelligence community has themselves admitted that in addition to grounds of national security, the communications collected by FISA are tapped into to “advance U.S. foreign policy priorities around the world.”
The primary sources of such communication are of course “electronic communications service (ECS) provider[s],” U.S. technology companies that provide digital services to people around the world. The U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment to FISA in April 2024 that expands the definition of ECS providers to include “any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications,” radically altering the scope of the entities that must cooperate with the U.S. intelligence for data collection.
Effectively, all internet traffic (from Indians and other non-U.S. nationals) processed by Starlink can be made available to U.S. intelligence agencies without fuss. While most internet traffic is encrypted from the user to servers, the metadata from such communication still carries information about what services a user is accessing and when.
When it comes to Starlink, however, internet traffic is perhaps not the only information that the company gets access to. Starlink is more than a communication service – it is a satellite constellation in LEO. E. A. S. Sarma, former secretary to the Union government, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) separately, have rightly pointed out that these satellites can also carry payloads such as radars, infrared, and visual spectrum imaging.
Starlink’s sister initiative under SpaceX, Starshield, which uses similar satellites, is explicitly aimed at being a contractor to U.S. military and intelligence. An official veil of secrecy exists over the contracts worth billions that SpaceX has signed over the years with various U.S. government agencies. Reuters revealed last year that Starshield entered into a contract with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office to build and maintain a spy satellite network. A spokesperson from the Office called it the “most capable, diverse, and resilient space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system the world has ever seen.”
It is unclear whether and how the operations of Starlink and Starshield are isolated from each other, but it is a near technical certainty that both constellations can be inter-connected. Starshield’s rise may continue unabated regardless due to U.S. dominance, but there are no reasons for India to enable that malicious growth.
Even if Starlink’s satellites do not carry other surveillance-enabling payloads, the U.S. has never shied away from using its influence over its companies to bully allies or enemies alike. After SpaceX won the Pentagon contract to provide satellite services to Ukraine, Starlink was made free for the Ukrainian military and used for military capabilities. However, this year, when the U.S. wanted access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, American negotiators threatened to pull Starlink’s services from Ukraine if their demands were not met. Conversely, in Gaza, where the Israeli regime is inflicting a genocide, the U.S. made availability of Starlink’s services to Palestinians contingent on the approval of the Israeli government.
Thus, SpaceX is firmly embedded within and subservient to U.S. intelligence and foreign policy interests, and its entry into India is fraught with a pernicious undermining of national autonomy – risks that have not been systematically assessed yet.
These arguments, however, do not take away from the general utility and advantages of satellite-enabled internet access. It is often costly to connect remote and hilly regions with fiber connections, and given that India has made modest progress in facilitating internet access to populations in rural areas, satellites can offer a way out of the lassitude of India’s connectivity programs.
However, the entry of a U.S. tech company, which specializes in unsustainable direct-to-consumer services and increases the potential of foreign interference in India, will not be particularly useful for expanding internet connectivity. As Dr. Raquel Renno put it, “heralding satellite internet as the panacea for all connectivity issues risks perpetuating [Global North’s technology companies’] dominance, potentially at the expense of stifling local innovation and technological autonomy.”
Rather than expand terrestrial internet connectivity or explore more sustainable satellite internet connectivity, the recent events indicate India’s uncritical and pernicious reliance on U.S. tech companies, to the extent of undermining its own national and technological visions.