The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said on Friday it intends to charge satellite internet players up to 4% of their adjusted gross revenue (AGR) over a five-year period to use spectrum allocated to them for satellite broadband services.
According to a statement from TRAI, both geostationary and non-geostationary satellite operators will have to pay a minimum annual fee of INR3,500 (around US$41) per MHz, with a cap of 4% of AGR.
Non-geostationary satellite operators – such as Eutelsat OneWeb and Starlink – will also have to pay an additional INR500 per subscriber per year for urban areas. Rural and remote areas will be exempt from the subscriber fee. TRAI said the government will also consider whether to subsidise satellite terminals in those areas.
TRAI also recommended that the Ku, Ka, Q/V, L, S, and C bands be assigned a period of five years, which the option to extend the assignment by another two years.
The proposal comes after months of consultation and debate that started when TRAI issued a consultation paper on terms and conditions for assigning spectrum for satellite internet services in September 2024.
The proposal still has to be approved by the Department of Telecommunication’s Digital Communications Commission and ratified by the cabinet, but it would officially establish TRAI’s preferred method of assigning satellite spectrum by administrative allocation rather than an auction process.
India’s three main telcos – Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea – had argued that an auction would be more fair, as the administrative allocation process would unfairly enable satellite broadband players to compete with telcos by offering cheaper internet services.
According to a report from ETTelecom on Friday, TRAI chairman AK Lahoti reiterated that the regulator considers satellite broadband to be a complementary service for terrestrial broadband, not a competitive one.
“It’s not factually correct that satcom services are competing with terrestrial services because there is a huge difference between the capacity of the terrestrial network and the satellite network,” Lahoti was quoted as saying.
Ironically, Airtel and Jio signed separate partnership deals with Starlink in March. Jio is also working with LEO satellite operator Eutelsat OneWeb via Orbit Connect India, the JV it established with SES in 2022.
The TRAI recommendations arrived a day after Starlink received a Letter of Intent from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for a satcom licence. The LEO satellite operator still needs clearance from Indian space regulator IN–SPACe before it can officially launch services.
Like Eutelsat OneWeb and Orbit Connect (which have all the necessary licences and regulatory clearances), Starlink is also waiting for the DoT to officially allocate spectrum with which to offer services, although the DoT provisionally allocated satellite spectrum to OneWeb and Orbit Connect in October 2024 for testing their respective satellite broadband services.
All licencees will also be required to comply with long list of security requirements, which the DoT revised last week.
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