Starlink can provide services only to 2 million users in India: Centre

Elon Musk’s satellite communication service Starlink will be able to provide connections to only 2 million users in India, with a maximum speed of 200 megabits per second (mbps) across the country for ₹3,000 per month, said Union Minister of State for Telecommunications Pemmasani Chandra Sekhar.

It is due to this high upfront cost that the services of Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), especially in rural areas, will not be impacted, Pemmasani said.

“So, there is no way satellites can provide any meaningful connectivity in India,” he said. He was speaking on the sidelines of a day-long review meeting of BSNL on Monday.


The Minister of State’s comments come against the backdrop of private telecommunications (telecom) service providers flagging Starlink’s entry into India on the grounds that the company's satellite service directly competed with the terrestrial services being offered by the carriers. State-run BSNL competes with the private telecom operators in the Indian market.

Over the last year, the government has installed 100,000 4G towers for BSNL. Both the software and hardware have been developed indigenously in the country, he said, adding that BSNL is resolving issues with 4G connections across the country on an ongoing basis.

“The integration, developing everything within two-three years, was hard. There were some issues, and we have cleaned up a lot of that. Ninety per cent of the problems have been solved. Our goal is to get everybody on the same page,” Pemmasani said.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is also working to resolve legacy issues, such as the lack of adequate power backup for BSNL’s towers and base stations, as well as disconnected fixed-line fibre, he said. Once these issues are resolved, the next step will be to market and sell BSNL’s products and offerings, ensuring the telco achieves true profitability, he said. The government and DoT are also working to improve the average revenue per user (Arpu) of the state-run telco and bring it on par with that of the private players, the minister of state said.

“It is different based on the (telecom) circle. If you have a lot of rural communities and low affordability, the revenue per user is a little bit different from some of the metro circles,” he said.

In some rural circles, BSNL has an average weighted Arpu of up to ₹70 per user, whereas in select urban circles, it reaches as high as ₹170, a DoT official later stated.

Despite the government’s capital expenditure on BSNL, the state-run telco is unlikely to implement a tariff hike in the near future to improve its ARPU margin, Pemmasani said.

“We want people to experience the BSNL service again. People will have a choice now,” he said.