Elon Musk’s Starlink entry dogged by security concerns and questions

‘Starlink, welcome to India! Will be useful for remote area railway projects,’ posted Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister who holds the portfolios of information and broadcasting, information technology and the railways.

The post on X was, however, deleted within hours, prompting AITC MP Saket Gokhale to post the following reaction: ‘India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw tweeted saying “Starlink, welcome to India” & then deleted his tweet.

‘Elon Musk’s Starlink has not yet gotten govt approval. It also has not been allotted any satellite spectrum. But the tweet by Ashwini Vaishnaw clearly shows that spineless PM Modi is going to bend over backwards for Trump & Elon Musk.

‘The ‘govt approval’ is clearly guaranteed.’

Indeed, it is not clear why the minister deleted his post.

But the overnight marketing deals signed by the two dominant internet service providers in India — Bharti Mittal and Reliance — with SpaceX has raised several questions.

Until quite recently, both Bharti Mittal and Reliance — promoters of Airtel and Jio services respectively — were opposing the entry of Elon Musk’s Starlink to India. The Ambanis had even let it be known that Reliance would launch its own satellite-based internet service in India and had been lobbying for the allocation of space spectrum through an auction.

The virtually overnight signing of agreements with SpaceX by these two Indian telecom companies in particular therefore came as a surprise to the industry, several sources said.

Was it truly a surprise though?

The writing on the wall was clear, wasn't it, when the government caved in to the SpaceX's demand for spectrum to be allocated not by auction but by administrative decision? After all, the very rules of the game were changed to fit the Elon Musk playbook!

News agency Reuters reported on Thursday, 13 March, that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is planning to recommend the allocation of satellite broadband spectrum for five years and not 20 years as demanded by SpaceX, though.

TRAI, the agency reported, is likely to take a month or so to finalise its recommendation.

Meanwhile, the two Indian companies are said to have decided against competing with Musk — especially in view of his seemingly growing influence in the White House and over US president Donald Trump.

Nobody knows whether the two companies were arm-twisted into falling in line or whether they decided on their own that discretion was the better part of valour.

That has not prevented questions from being raised — although the Indian mainstream media have been extremely subdued and cautious in reporting this ‘historic’ milestone. Their coverage — what there has been — has been mostly celebratory, dwelling on the technological edge that Starlink would provide to high-speed internet services.

And yet, Starlink’s close relationship with the US government and the military industrial complex have always been cited as a security risk — and not just in India. If anything, the threat of losing Starlink services, and with it certain defence capabilities, hanging over Ukraine — where president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been slow to sufficiently kow-tow to the POTUS and his ‘courtiers’ of the cabinet, who call him 'ungrateful' — should have been instructive.

The parent entity of Starlink, SpaceX, holds an USD 1.8 billion contract with the National Reconnaissance Office as part of the Starshield programme to construct spy satellites for the use of the US military. This has fuelled speculation as to whether Starlink might provide US agencies access to Indian user information without the oversight of the Indian government.

Given America’s history of surveillance programmes such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), these speculations do not seem entirely misplaced.

Starlink is not the initial or the only provider of satellite internet. Some competitors, including Viasat, HughesNet and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, have been around for years.

The innovative method of Starlink, however, makes the difference.

Rather than using a handful of huge satellites, Starlink employs thousands of small satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO). These satellites, ranging from 200 km to 2,000 km above Earth, communicate through laser links, cutting reliance on ground-based infrastructure. More than half of all LEO satellites in orbit are said to be owned by Starlink.

Meanwhile, the CPI(M), which is holding its Politburo meeting in Kerala, put out a statement on 13 March that highlighted how the Supreme Court's comments in the 2G case underscore what a rare commodity spectrum is and judged that it should be allocated to private players only through "open, transparent auction".

Mention is thus made of it being a "violation of the law of the land" for Jio, Airtel and Starlink to form "a cartel to dominate satellite spectrum... at the cost of millions of telecom subscribers in India".

"Further," it said, "satellite spectrum should be allocated exclusively for strategic uses, such as defence and ISRO operations."

The Politburo statement points out that it is not only a matter of scarcity of spectrum, but also that the number of orbital slots a country has is limited.

"Allowing such satellites to capture vital orbital slots but also use them for mapping our natural resources, gathering commercially commercially valuable data, e.g., weather, the status of crops, and, of course, strategic military/defence data, would be against our national and security interests. Particularly as ISRO and other Indian agencies have the ability to do so," the statement reads.

As such, the role of ISRO has also come into question.

The Indian space agency has been launching satellites for other countries as well, besides launching missions to the Moon and Mars. It has launched several communication satellites that are already in use. Why couldn’t ISRO step in and provide an indigenous service, then?

That is another question that is not going away anytime soon.

It is also being asked why the government did not press SpaceX to sign the marketing deal with the state-owned BSNL, which already provides better internet services in the rural areas. For if bringing in Starlink is justified as satellite communication for remote areas — as Vaishnaw's tweet suggested too — then BSNL was the ideal partner, point out some industry sources.