Beyond the spectrum fight — Five quieter battles shaping India’s D2D story

By the time DoT finalises terms for the administratively allocated satellite-communications spectrum, the public storyline has hardened into a clean three-way race: Reliance Jio–SES, Bharti Airtel–Eutelsat OneWeb, and a Starlink that, after a March 2025 distribution tie-up with Reliance Retail and a third-quarter 2025 letter of intent from the government, looks more frenemy than outright outsider. Tata’s decision to resell OneWeb services adds a fourth distribution lane. Vodafone Idea, partnered with AST SpaceMobile, is still working through a regulatory snag. This is the version of the story that has been told fifty times. The more interesting version is what is not being said.

1. The Bharat math does not yet work
Indian satellite communications is a USD 3.77 billion market in 2026, projected to nearly double to USD 7.93 billion by 2031 at a 16 percent CAGR, according to Mordor Intelligence. Industry estimates place the full telecom–satcom convergence opportunity at upwards of INR 3 lakh crore over the decade. The numbers are real. The question is who they belong to.

Reliance Jio closed Q3 FY26 with an ARPU of INR 213.7; Bharti Airtel at INR 259; Vodafone Idea at INR 186. Trade-press chatter pegs consumer D2D add-ons at INR 49–199 a month — the low end of which is less than one cup of filter coffee, and the high end of which still represents an 80–90 percent uplift on a Vi user’s average bill. Enterprise and fixed-wireless satellite broadband, where Jio–SES and Airtel–OneWeb expect ARPUs of INR 5,000–25,000 a month, is plausibly the only segment where unit economics close in the near term.

In other words, the consumer satellite-to-phone pitch — the connect-Bharat narrative driving the spectrum lobbying — is for now a margin-thin add-on. The real money is in B2B and B2G. That changes who the turf war is actually about. It is not telecoms versus space; it is whoever owns the enterprise distribution and the government tender pipeline.

2. The handset bottleneck nobody is pricing in
A satellite-to-phone service is, by definition, only as good as the phones that can use it. Globally, native D2D is concentrated in premium devices: iPhone 14 onwards via Globalstar; Samsung Galaxy S25 and Pixel 9 via Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X80 modem in combination with Skylo’s NTN platform; and a broader LTE Band 25 footprint addressable by Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell architecture, which is the most permissive of the three, with roughly sixty supported models.

India’s installed base is a different animal. The bulk of active users sit on sub-INR 15,000 Android phones that do not carry NTN-capable modems. The Snapdragon X80 occupies the top quartile of the market by price. Qualcomm’s earlier Iridium-NTN tie-up was wound down, leaving Apple alone in the premium-native segment. The net effect is that the consumer D2D market in India for the next three to five years will almost certainly be Starlink-flavoured — because Starlink’s reuse of standard LTE bands means the addressable handset universe is several multiples larger than the Snapdragon-Satellite universe. This is a quietly enormous structural advantage for the Jio–Starlink distribution arrangement, and a problem for any operator strategy that depends on consumers carrying NTN-grade devices.

3. The squeezed-out Indian NewSpace story
While the public conversation revolves around four foreign constellations — SES, OneWeb, Starlink and AST SpaceMobile — India’s own private space sector has grown to more than 300 companies. IN-SPACe has just awarded an INR 1,200–1,500 crore mandate for a twelve-satellite Earth-observation constellation to a domestic consortium of Pixxel, Dhruva Space, SatSure and PierSight. Dhruva is scaling a 280,000-square-foot assembly, integration and testing facility in Shamshabad capable of producing 100 satellites a year. Pixxel has six Firefly hyperspectral satellites on orbit.

These are not D2D constellations. But that is the point. India has not yet seriously asked whether a sovereign D2D layer — built on Indian-manufactured satellites, perhaps in partnership with NSIL or backed by IN-SPACe procurement — is a strategic objective. The current framework, by privileging operators with existing in-orbit capacity, locks in foreign supply for a decade. By the time domestic players reach LEO D2D scale, the regulatory and commercial terrain may already be settled. Industry expects DoT to lean toward the incumbent consortia in the post-TRAI notification due this quarter. Worth asking who is not at that table.

4. Disaster resilience: The actual killer application
The most defensible policy case for D2D is one operators talk about least: India’s terrestrial network failure modes. The Wayanad landslides, the Sikkim glacial lake outburst flood and successive Uttarakhand events each saw cellular networks degrade or collapse for hours or days. NDMA’s Integrated Alert System (SACHET) has pushed more than 6,899 crore SMS alerts across nineteen languages, and the DoT–NDMA indigenous Cell Broadcast System is now in pan-India testing for sub-minute disaster-warning dissemination. Both, however, depend on a working terrestrial leg.

D2D’s irreducible value proposition is that it does not. Yet there is no current obligation on licensees to maintain free or subsidised emergency-message capacity, no Indian equivalent of the United States 911 mandate for satellite-to-phone, and no published integration spec linking D2D services to NDMA’s CAP-based alerting backbone. Reframing the spectrum debate around this — universal-service obligations on satellite emergency capacity, in exchange for the administrative allocation industry is already getting — would do more for the connect-Bharat case than another round of pricing-floor lobbying.

5. The sovereignty undercurrent
Of the 1,841 villages in the Northeast still without mobile coverage as of February 2026, 1,176 are in Arunachal Pradesh — a state China claims in full. Ladakh has ten uncovered villages; Jammu and Kashmir, 248. These are the places D2D coverage actually matters for the Indian state, not just for the operator P&L. The strategic logic was made plain in Ukraine, where Starlink shifted from civilian utility to battlefield enabler within forty-eight hours, and where Kyiv has since had to introduce user authorisation to claw back sovereign control of its own satcom layer.

India’s regulatory posture is already a partial response to this. The DoT’s extension of provisional trial spectrum for Orbit Connect India and Eutelsat OneWeb in mid-2025 was rooted in unmet security requirements — gateway location, lawful interception, data localisation and government liaison teams with monitoring access. The unspoken question behind administrative allocation is whether the Indian state wants D2D capacity it can throttle, redirect or repurpose in a contingency. With a foreign-majority constellation, the answer is structurally compromised; with an Indian-majority stack, even one carrying foreign capacity, it is not. That, more than spectrum pricing, is the real argument for the framework DoT has chosen. The industry is just not allowed to say so out loud.

Three near-term inflection points will decide which of these quieter battles surfaces.

First, DoT’s spectrum-pricing notification following TRAI’s May recommendations: pricing floors will signal whether the policy frame is consumer access or enterprise capture.

Second, the Vodafone Idea–AST SpaceMobile regulatory call: a denial reinforces the incumbent triumvirate; an approval cracks the consumer-D2D market open via cheaper hardware.

Third, the next IN-SPACe procurement window: whether it includes D2D capacity will tell the industry whether India is buying its own sovereign layer or renting one.

The turf war is not ending. It is just moving to ground the trade press has not yet mapped.
BCS Bureau