The D2D dividend — Inside India’s ₹3 lakh crore telecom-satcom convergence

Why 2025 and 2026 will decide whether Direct-to-Device satellite services become Indian telecom’s biggest opportunity, or its most disruptive threat

The Indian telecom industry is staring at a question it cannot postpone much longer. Direct-to-Device, or D2D, satellite communication has moved from PowerPoint slides to real commercial deployment. With the sector clocking close to ₹3 lakh crore (about $36 billion) in revenue during FY25, the stakes for Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, and BSNL are unusually large. The honest debate inside boardrooms today is not whether to do D2D. It is how to do it without losing customers, margins, or both.

A sector that is healing, slowly
By the start of 2025, India’s mobile networks were carrying around 1.16 billion wireless connections, with broadband subscribers a touch above 950 million. Average revenue per user (ARPU) had crawled back to a little over ₹200 for Jio and was nudging ₹250 for Airtel, helped by the July 2024 tariff hike, which pushed prices up by 11-25 percent. Even so, the sector is far from comfortable. Together, Jio and Airtel have already poured more than ₹3 lakh crore into 5G rollout, and standalone 5G monetisation is still a slow climb. About 25,000 villages remain patchily covered, and Vodafone Idea is still wrestling with adjusted gross revenue (AGR) liabilities of more than ₹70,000 crore.

This is the backdrop against which the satellite communications story is now being written. The EY–ISpA report of 2024 expects India’s space economy to expand to roughly $44 billion by 2033, of which satellite communication services alone could be worth around $25 billion, against a base of less than $3 billion in 2024. BCG and Deloitte separately estimate that the addressable D2D opportunity in India by 2030 will sit between $1.5 billion and $2 billion a year, growing at over 25 percent annually.

The 2025 pivot
The first three months of 2025 produced what may eventually be remembered as the most consequential quarter for Indian satcom. In March, both Jio and Airtel signed distribution arrangements with SpaceX to bring Starlink into the Indian market, subject, of course, to final clearances. The optics were hard to miss. Only a few months earlier, the same two telcos had pushed back hard against administrative allocation of satellite spectrum, arguing in favour of an auction process that would have made it tougher and more expensive for SpaceX to enter. Their about-turn was a quiet admission that satellite is now too important to fight from the sidelines.

By the middle of 2025, the Department of Telecommunications had clarified its administrative allocation framework, broadly accepting the recommendations TRAI had submitted late in 2024. The pricing template suggested a spectrum charge of around 4 percent of adjusted gross revenue for satellite operators, along with an additional ₹500 per urban subscriber per year. Built into the framework were predictable conditions: security clearances, lawful intercept, and local data routing. These rules nudge foreign satcom firms, almost by design, toward Indian telco partners rather than independent rollouts.

Eutelsat OneWeb (in which Bharti is a major shareholder) and the Jio–SES joint venture had already received their GMPCS licences. By the third quarter of 2025, Starlink received its long-awaited letter of intent, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper continued its journey through security review. Each of these players has serious money behind it. Eutelsat OneWeb has committed over $3.5 billion to its constellation. SES has put roughly $4 billion into its mPOWER MEO fleet. Starlink, with more than 7,000 operational satellites by early 2026, has spent over $10 billion globally.

The case for D2D as a friend
Strip away the noise, and the economics still favor cooperation. Per gigabyte, satellite bandwidth costs anywhere from 10 to 20 times as much as 4G or 5G. A typical Starlink fixed broadband plan is priced globally between $50 and $120 a month. Its early Direct-to-Cell offering with T-Mobile in the United States is positioned as a $10-$15 add-on and is restricted to messaging and basic voice. Compare that with an Indian mobile ARPU of ₹200 to ₹250 (about $2.50 to $3), and the picture becomes clear. D2D, in its current form, is not designed to replace the daily diet of YouTube, Reels, and OTT content that Indian users have grown accustomed to.

This price gap firmly places D2D in the complementary bucket. Jio and Airtel can wrap satellite messaging or emergency calling into postpaid plans and finally monetise rural coverage gaps without giving up the customer relationship. Vodafone Idea is reportedly evaluating a similar arrangement with AST SpaceMobile. Industry executives privately suggest that even a modest take-up, say 5 to 10 percent of a 100 million subscriber base, on a satellite add-on priced between ₹49 and ₹99 a month would deliver ₹600 to ₹1,000 crore in incremental annual revenue per major operator. And the heavy CapEx in this scenario falls to the satellite partner, not the telco.

The enterprise and government story stretches the opportunity further. Disaster recovery, defence communications, maritime and aviation links, mining, oil and gas, IoT in agriculture: each of these is a use case that telecom towers were never going to address well in any case. The Indian Navy alone has signed multi-year satcom contracts worth over ₹4,000 crore. Aviation Wi-Fi, which was liberalised recently, is on track to be a ₹1,500 crore market by 2028. None of this eats into existing telecom revenue. It expands the pie.

The case for D2D as a future foe
Then comes the part that telecom CFOs prefer not to dwell on. The disruption case is genuine, and 2026 is the year it will start showing up in the numbers. AST SpaceMobile, whose market capitalisation crossed $9 billion in early 2025, is scaling its BlueBird constellation to push speeds of up to 120 Mbps directly to ordinary smartphones. SpaceX’s Direct-to-Cell service, which moved from messaging to voice during 2025, is on schedule to add data in 2026. The cost per bit of satellite data is reportedly falling by 20 to 30 percent every year, aided by reusable launch vehicles, mass-produced flat-panel antennas, and laser links between satellites.

The most exposed slice of the Indian market is the premium and enterprise base. A multinational operating across far-flung sites in India might prefer a single global satcom contract to five fragmented telco arrangements. High-end travellers, fleet operators, and emergency services are obvious candidates for universal-coverage subscriptions. Even a 2 percent migration from the high-ARPU base, roughly 20 million subscribers above ₹500 ARPU, into a hybrid satellite-first plan would dent telco revenues by more than ₹12,000 crore a year.

The longer-term risk is structural. As satellite constellations get denser and devices become better at switching between terrestrial and satellite networks, the difference between a telecom operator and a connectivity provider becomes harder to defend. Apple, Google, and the handset makers may slowly start to own the customer relationship. The Indian telecom industry has watched the cable television industry get squeezed in exactly this fashion. Apple’s investment of more than $1.5 billion in Globalstar to underpin emergency satellite messaging on the iPhone is the early warning sign that no one in Mumbai or Gurugram boardrooms can afford to ignore.

What 2026 looks like
The next eighteen months will set the rules of engagement. By the end of 2026, India should see its first commercial-scale D2D services, initially focused on emergency messaging and voice in patchy-coverage zones. Pricing for consumers is expected to fall in the ₹49-₹199 per month range as add-ons to existing plans. Jio–SES and Eutelsat OneWeb–Airtel are best placed to capture the enterprise and fixed-wireless satellite broadband segment, where ARPUs of ₹5,000 to ₹25,000 a month are perfectly reasonable. Starlink, once cleared, will go after both consumer and enterprise pieces, with brand familiarity working strongly in its favour.

Brokerage houses, including Jefferies and Goldman Sachs, put the combined India satcom revenue pool at around ₹35,000 crore by 2030, of which D2D could account for ₹8,000 to ₹12,000 crore. That is roughly 4 percent of the current Indian telecom market. Small enough to be additive, big enough to deserve a board-level strategy. Capex implications for Indian operators are not trivial either. Jio and Airtel are each expected to spend around ₹2,000-₹3,000 crore over 2025-2027 on satellite gateway infrastructure, ground stations, and integration platforms.

The verdict
For at least the next two years, D2D in India will look more like a friend of telecom than a foe. The economics, the regulatory architecture, and the customer relationships all line up that way. But the threat is not imaginary. It is a few quarters away. As the cost of satellite data keeps dropping and consumers grow used to always-on connectivity wherever they go, the line between complement and competitor will get thinner.

Telcos in India do not have the luxury of waiting it out. The ones that build D2D into their networks as a native part of the customer experience, billing, service, and devices, will harvest the upside. Those who treat satellite as a side experiment risk being squeezed out by global players who are perfectly happy to take a long view of the Indian opportunity. The smarter strategy is to embrace D2D right now, on Indian terms, before someone else makes the call on their behalf.