Elon Musk’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’ Kuiper push for lower satellite wave prices, caution to compete in urban areas too

Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper are both pushing for lower satellite spectrum prices in India, according to an Economic Times report.

Which added that Kuiper is cautioning that expensive airwaves will force them to target urban consumers too instead of the original aim of providing connectivity to remote areas where deploying terrestrial communications infrastructure like phone towers is not very feasible.

However, this would also make them compete with large domestic telecom players including Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel.

This comes after Starlink on Friday saying satellite spectrum is a shared resource and can’t be auctioned, directly countering the demands of Mukesh Ambani who owns Jio, India’s largest telco, as well as Sunil Mittal who heads Airtel.

However, Mittal’s demand is to auction spectrum in all areas except the remote regions.

Currently OneWeb and Jio-SES are the only two entities with all the approvals and permits needed for offering satcom services in the country.

Starlink and Kuiper’s applications are still pending along with all others.