Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite communications company, fought behind the scenes for months to break into India’s internet business. The market is dominated by two local giants, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, who seemed united in trying to keep Starlink out.
Then, suddenly, this week each of them announced a partnership to bring Starlink into India, pending the government’s approval.
Jio, a branch of India’s biggest corporation, said on Tuesday it would team up with Starlink “to deliver reliable broadband services across the country, including in the most remote and rural regions.” Hours earlier, Airtel had celebrated a deal in similar terms.
The support of two of India’s most influential tycoons, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance and Sunil Bharti Mittal of Bharti Airtel, was a breakthrough for Mr. Musk, whose businesses have tried for years to gain access to India.
Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, said in a statement accompanying Jio’s announcement that she looked forward to “receiving authorization from the government of India to provide more people, organizations and businesses with access to Starlink’s high-speed internet services.” Airtel noted that its partnership would be “subject to SpaceX receiving its own authorizations.” With local partners, who hold the government’s ear, Starlink’s odds look stronger.
As Mr. Musk stands side by side with President Trump, trying to aggressively shrink the government of the United States, his business dealings around the world have become even more prominent. In India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to placate Mr. Trump to avoid tariffs, Mr. Musk’s long struggle to crack the market for his car company, Tesla, has attracted a lot of attention. But Starlink could be a bigger prize.
Starlink’s low-Earth orbit satellites swarm the globe, making it possible to beam internet services to the surface at broadband quality. Where ground based internet is patchy, as in rural parts of India, Starlink sees an opportunity.
Mr. Ambani’s Jio, the world’s biggest provider of mobile data, has half a billion subscribers. But for generations, foreign companies have found it impossible to challenge the Ambani family on its home turf.
With Mr. Trump’s election, and Mr. Musk’s proximity to power in Washington, new arrangements seem possible.
India’s business and political leaders have held a flurry of closed-door meetings with Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Mr. Ambani attended one of Mr. Trump’s inauguration parties in January, and Mr. Modi was photographed having a chummy meeting with Mr. Musk in Washington last month. India’s commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, spent last week in Washington and Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, is due in New Delhi next week.
In India, Starlink has been fighting two battles simultaneously. The first is against India’s firm sense of national security. To qualify for a communications license, foreign companies need to pass a gauntlet of regulatory tests. Starlink briefly took preorders in India in 2021, drawing an angry response from India’s ministry of communications, which told it to quit selling until it got government approval, which is under review.
The other battle pitted the world’s richest person, Mr. Musk, against Asia’s richest person, Mr. Ambani. The Jio owner had teamed up with Airtel’s, normally a fierce competitor, to argue that rights to beam the internet to India should be sold by the government at auction. Starlink wanted to avoid a bidding war, which would force it to outspend companies that had already staked big bets on the Indian market.
Nikhil Pahwa, the founder of MediaNama, which provides analysis of India’s technology policy, said it is unclear whether Starlink will compete directly with the two Indian telecoms giants, or if it will only serve them. That matters, because “there’s lack of competition in the Indian market for internet access,” he said. Mobile data is cheaper in India than anywhere in the world, at just 14 cents per gigabyte, but “if Starlink doesn’t offer its own services, this only entrenches the duopoly of Airtel and Jio,” he said.
In either case, Starlink stands to corner the market in satellite based internet to India. Both Airtel and Jio had begun investing in alternative systems, developed at great expense with European partners, but could decide to rely exclusively on Starlink instead.
Others worry about different kinds of vulnerability, such as Mr. Musk’s ability to use Starlink as an instrument of geopolitics. Starlink’s services have been restricted multiple times in Ukraine during the war there.
Last week, Mr. Musk had an ill-tempered exchange on social media with Poland’s foreign minister, who said that if Starlink proved an “unreliable provider” in Ukraine, the country’s allies would look for other suppliers. Mr. Musk responded sharply — “Be quiet, small man” — and added that he would never switch off its services in Ukraine, because “without Starlink, the Ukrainian lines would collapse.”
After the deals with Jio and Airtel were announced, Jairam Ramesh, a spokesman for India’s opposition Congress Party, asked in a post: “Who will have the power to switch connectivity on or off when national security demands it? Will it be Starlink or its Indian partners?”
