The spectrum dispute that could redraw India’s broadcast landscape

The disagreement between Airtel and Jio over repurposing 26 GHz airwaves for Wi-Fi may read, on the surface, as an internal telecom industry argument about spectrum governance. For India’s broadcasting sector, however, it is something more consequential, a signal flare about the speed at which fixed wireless broadband will reach the living rooms that linear television has long called its stronghold.

A proxy battle for the last mile
The 26 GHz band, acquired by telecom operators in the 2022 auctions for 5G mobile broadband, is now at the centre of a disagreement about whether those airwaves can be redeployed for fixed wireless access and Wi-Fi services. Jio’s push to allow this repurposing reflects a strategic interest in accelerating home broadband penetration through wireless means, rather than the slower, more capital-intensive route of laying fibre to every door. Airtel’s resistance reflects, among other things, concern about diluting the integrity of spectrum acquired for specific mobile uses and the competitive implications of allowing a rival to build a parallel broadband infrastructure at speed.

What is being contested, at its core, is how quickly India’s broadband infrastructure can be disaggregated from the cable and DTH pipes that have historically carried television into homes. The answer to that question is one of the most important variables in the future of Indian broadcasting.

Linear television’s structural vulnerability
India’s linear broadcast industry, free-to-air channels, pay-TV networks, DTH operators and cable distribution companies, has operated for decades on the implicit assumption that the last mile is sticky. Getting broadband into homes fast enough, and affordably enough, to make streaming the default mode of television consumption has been a slow process. Fibre rollouts are expensive and geographically uneven. Mobile data, while cheap, has bandwidth and latency characteristics that make it imperfect for sustained, high-quality household viewing. These constraints have given linear television a resilience that content trends alone would not have sustained.

Fixed wireless broadband changes that equation. A 5G or millimetre-wave connection delivered to a home router can offer fibre-equivalent speeds without the civil infrastructure costs of trenching cables. If Jio succeeds in deploying Wi-Fi broadband over 26 GHz spectrum at scale, reaching tier-2 and tier-3 cities and dense urban housing societies where fibre penetration is thin, the technological friction that has slowed streaming adoption in those markets begins to dissolve.

The acceleration effect
The implications for broadcasting are not linear. Each percentage point of increase in quality home broadband penetration does not simply add a proportional number of streaming subscribers; it tends to accelerate a behavioural shift that is already underway. Once a household has reliable, high-speed home broadband, the calculus around a monthly DTH or cable subscription changes. On-demand content libraries, sports streaming rights and ad-supported free streaming services become genuinely competitive alternatives to the scheduled programming model that pay-TV depends upon.

India’s major streaming platforms JioCinema, Disney+ Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video and others, have already demonstrated that price-sensitive Indian consumers will migrate to OTT when the value proposition is clear. The constraint has been connectivity quality in non-metro markets, where streaming buffers, HD content stutters and the TV set connected to a DTH dish remains the more reliable viewing experience. Fixed wireless broadband, deployed aggressively over millimetre-wave spectrum, is the infrastructure development most likely to remove that constraint at scale and at speed.

What broadcasters should read in this dispute
For traditional broadcasters, the significance of the Airtel-Jio spectrum dispute lies not in who wins the regulatory argument, but in what either outcome reveals about the trajectory of home broadband infrastructure. If TRAI permits the refarming of 26 GHz airwaves for Wi-Fi use, it signals regulatory willingness to prioritise broadband proliferation over strict spectrum-use classifications, an approach that is likely to encourage further fixed wireless investment and accelerate the connectivity transition.

If the refarming is blocked and spectrum use is kept narrowly to licensed mobile broadband purposes, the pace of fixed wireless broadband scaling slows. Fibre becomes the primary alternative, and its geographic reach and timeline remain constrained by capital and civil works. In that scenario, linear broadcast retains its structural advantage in underserved markets for longer.

Neither outcome is permanent. The direction of travel, from linear, scheduled, distribution-controlled television toward on-demand, internet-delivered, platform-mediated content — is not in dispute. What is being negotiated, in spectrum policy discussions like this one, is the pace of that transition and how much runway India’s traditional broadcast industry has to adapt its business models, renegotiate content rights, and build OTT capabilities of its own.

The strategic imperative for broadcasters
The lesson for broadcasters is that spectrum policy is audience policy. Decisions made in regulatory filings about millimetre-wave airwaves are decisions, indirectly, about when India’s mass-market television audience becomes a mass-market streaming audience. Broadcasters that treat the Airtel-Jio dispute as a telecom industry matter unrelated to their planning assumptions are misreading the signal.

The more productive response is to treat accelerating home broadband penetration as a planning assumption rather than a risk scenario, to build OTT infrastructure, streaming distribution and direct-to-consumer relationships with the urgency that the broadband trajectory warrants, rather than the pace that linear subscription revenues currently permit.

Fixed wireless broadband may not be the technology that finally tips India’s television market toward streaming. But this dispute is a reminder that the infrastructure capable of doing so is being actively built, contested and shaped, and that the outcome of those contests will arrive in broadcast balance sheets faster than most industry timelines currently assume.
BCS Bureau