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Elon Musk has reached an agreement to introduce Starlink to India in a tie-up with local telecoms tycoon Sunil Mittal, as the rival billionaires join forces in the battle to bring satellite internet services to the world’s most populous nation.
The partnership between Musk’s SpaceX and Mittal’s Bharti Airtel was announced on Tuesday and pitches the duo against Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio.
Asia’s richest man had previously been joined by his longtime domestic adversary Mittal in attempts to convince the government to auction spectrum for space-fed internet. Musk’s view has been that spectrum should be directly allocated.
This deal with Mittal marks Musk’s latest effort to break into India, a market in which his businesses have struggled to make headway owing to tariffs and regulatory issues that have stymied efforts to introduce Tesla cars to the country.
Neil Shah, the Mumbai-based co-founder of Counterpoint Research, said Ambani’s Jio — the country’s largest telecoms operator that runs a near duopoly in India alongside Airtel — was unlikely to halt its attempts to prevent Starlink’s entrance.
“Obviously the domestic players don’t want to have much competition from outside,” he added. “SpaceX is way ahead of others when it comes to competition, I think that is one of the reasons why Airtel partnered with them so they can get a head start.”
“This is the first step,” said Shah. “We’ll see more going forward from Elon Musk.”
Musk’s troubles in India appear to have eased since he took up a high-profile position as key confidant to US President Donald Trump. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Musk in Washington last month, where they discussed issues including space and technology.
However, the partnership with Airtel also suggests a softening on his approach to his competitors, choosing to join forces with one of the nation’s powerful domestic billionaires in an effort to crack the market.
Airtel said on Tuesday that the agreement with SpaceX would enable the two telecom groups “to further explore how Starlink can complement and expand Airtel’s offerings, and how Airtel’s expertise in the Indian market complements SpaceX’s direct offerings to consumers and businesses”.
Mittal’s company, which already has regulatory approvals to launch satellite internet services in India through its joint venture with Anglo-French group Eutelsat OneWeb, noted that SpaceX would need to receive its “own authorisations to sell Starlink” in the country. Starlink’s licence to operate in India is still under review.
Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said the “team at Airtel has played a pivotal role in India’s telecom story, so working with them to complement our direct offering makes great sense for our business”.
Amazon is also expected to soon join the race to offer the internet through satellite constellations in India, via its Kuiper Systems service.
These global companies will now jostle for dominance in the Indian market, which has an active user base of more than 900mn from a total population of 1.4bn people. Industry insiders said that satellite internet services such as Starlink were expected to increase internet penetration in India’s remote villages or tough to access mountainous terrains.
However, demand for space internet services could be damped owing to their higher costs compared with 5G mobile internet, which has been rapidly rolled out across the country. “That is a big bottleneck in a price-sensitive market like India,” said Counterpoint’s Shah.
Airtel’s managing director Gopal Vittal said the partnership with Starlink “enhances our ability to bring world-class high-speed broadband to even the most remote parts of India”.
