Elon Musk’s Starlink and Sunil Mittal-promoted Bharti Airtel have argued against the auction of spectrum for space-based communications on the grounds that administrative allocations are globally regulated in their comments to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the mechanism for allocation. It is an adopted practice. air waves.
In contrast, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea have supported spectrum auctions, claiming that space-based services were effectively competing with terrestrial services, and that the government wanted regulatory parity on auctions of all types of airwaves. Should be kept
“SpaceX cannot strongly enough recommend against implementing an exclusionary auction design for allocating satellite spectrum,” Starlink said in its recommendations to TRAI. on a non-exclusive basis over broad geographic areas, which was separate from the airwaves for mobile services.
The satellite broadband service provider said it was unable to find any auction mechanism that did not have the significant flaw of artificially reducing competition by preventing access to shared spectrum.
Airtel said spectrum should be allocated based on an administrative approach, which would encourage participation from the private sector and start-ups to offer services at globally competitive prices.
TRAI should recommend suitable eligibility criteria to ensure speedy and efficient utilization of spectrum, and levy spectrum usage charges, not exceeding 1% of AGR, to recover the cost of administrative allocation.
“Airtel is concerned that auctioning satellite spectrum and creating an exclusivity will create barriers to competition as competitors may block access to it by bidding and winning partial or full spectrum despite such global allocation and disrupt the satellite system. can be made redundant and can be severely disrupted. emerging space ecosystem in the country,” it warned.
Bharti Global, the overseas arm of Bharti Enterprises, which is the parent company of Bharti Airtel, has the largest stake in satellite service provider OneWeb. OneWeb and France’s Eutelsat are in the process of merging to form a $3.4 billion entity.
Based on the information provided by communication service providers such as SpaceX’s Starlink project, OneWeb, Amazon’s Kuiper project and Telesat, it can be clearly established that they intend to build broadband communication services that are comparable to terrestrial broadband services. Jio said, hence the argument for auction-based allocation.
Reliance Jio Platforms has a joint venture with Paris-based SES for the Geostationary (GEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellation. Jio Satellite Communications Limited will provide global mobile personal communication by satellite services under GMPCS license issued by DoT.
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Updated: June 02, 2023, 11:08 PM IST