The orbital scramble—India joins the new space race

A second great unbundling is underway in global telecommunications, and this time it is happening above the atmosphere. After two decades in which terrestrial mobile networks defined the industry’s centre of gravity, the next strategic battleground is the increasingly crowded ring of low earth orbit, where a handful of players are laying down infrastructure that will determine who connects whom for the rest of the century. India, until recently a near-spectator in that contest, may be about to enter it at scale.

Reliance Industries is understood to be evaluating a major push into satellite communications, with a potential investment in the billions of dollars and a constellation strategy centred on low earth orbit. The work would sit within Jio Platforms, the holding company that already houses the group’s telecom and digital businesses, and would represent the most ambitious satcom move yet by an Indian conglomerate. Six internal teams are reportedly examining different layers of the stack — satellites, launches, payloads, user terminals — while engagement has begun with the Department of Telecommunications to secure orbital slots through the International Telecommunication Union.

The strategic logic for the move sits well outside the boundaries of any single company. Globally, the past three years have made it impossible to view satellite connectivity as a commercial niche. Recent conflicts have shown that satellite networks, particularly low Earth orbit constellations, are now battlefield infrastructure, capable of restoring connectivity in hours where terrestrial networks have been destroyed, and of being denied to one side or extended to the other depending on the politics of whoever controls them. That has reset the question for every government with strategic ambitions: do we want our citizens, our defence forces and our critical infrastructure relying on satellites operated by foreign companies, however friendly?

Most large economies have answered that question in the same direction. China has filed with the ITU for the deployment of around 200,000 satellites across multiple low Earth orbit constellations, an order of magnitude larger than anything currently flying. The European Union has accelerated its own sovereign satcom program. Several middle powers, including in the Gulf and Southeast Asia, have either taken stakes in foreign operators or begun their own constellation work. India, despite a long-standing public space program and a thriving private launch sector, has so far lacked a domestic non-geostationary constellation of its own — a gap that the government and the country’s space regulator are reportedly already discussing how to close.

That is the gap a Reliance push would aim to fill. Internal options reportedly include both organic build and inorganic acquisition, the latter potentially attractive because building a constellation from scratch is slow, and orbital slots and spectrum filings are themselves becoming a scarce resource. The most desirable LEO altitudes are filling up. The ITU’s filing system, which awards slots largely on a first-come, first-served basis, has already turned into a queue. Acquiring an operator that has secured slots is, therefore, not just a way to compress timelines; it is a way to buy assets that may not be available to anyone arriving late.

The competitive picture Reliance would be entering is by now well defined. Starlink, the largest and most operationally mature LEO constellation, has emerged as a de facto incumbent, with several thousand satellites in orbit and a consumer broadband business that has scaled faster than most analysts expected. Amazon’s recently rebranded Amazon Leo program is moving into early commercial deployment with deep balance-sheet support and a multi-decade horizon. OneWeb, now folded into Eutelsat, has built out a smaller constellation focused on enterprise and government customers. Eutelsat itself is majority-owned by the French government and counts the Bharti Group as its second-largest shareholder, giving India’s other large telecom group a meaningful seat at the global LEO table. AST SpaceMobile is targeting direct-to-handset connectivity from space. Sateliot is building a narrowband IoT constellation. The market is not empty, nor is it slow.

Reliance is not starting from zero either. The company already has a satcom partnership with the medium-earth-orbit operator SES, providing the basis for limited offerings in India once regulatory licensing is fully in place. But MEO, which sits at intermediate altitudes, is structurally different from LEO in the latency and capacity it delivers, and the strategic conversation now happening globally is overwhelmingly about LEO. A serious LEO play would mean either accelerating existing partnerships into something larger or building or acquiring an independent constellation, possibly both.

The timeline being discussed is, by industry standards, aggressive. A window of two to four years to have meaningful LEO assets in place is achievable only through substantial inorganic activity, given the time required to design, manufacture, certify, and launch hundreds or thousands of satellites. That is part of why several scenarios reportedly remain on the table simultaneously, including acquisition of an existing operator, deeper partnerships with manufacturers and launch providers, and a longer-term organic program that builds India’s domestic supply chain in parallel.

For India as a whole, the implications go well beyond the question of who provides broadband to remote households. A domestic LEO presence would reduce dependence on foreign-controlled networks for sensitive communications, strengthen surveillance and monitoring capabilities, and provide redundancy in scenarios where terrestrial networks are degraded. It would also create a domestic anchor customer for the country’s growing private space sector, which already operates launchers and components but has lacked a flagship commercial constellation program on home soil.

For Reliance specifically, satcom would extend a pattern that has defined the group’s last decade — entering capital-intensive, infrastructure-heavy industries late, but at a scale that resets the competitive structure. The pattern was set in mobile telecom, where Jio’s launch reordered the entire Indian market within months. Whether the same playbook can work in space, where the assets sit hundreds of kilometres above the country and where the competitors include some of the world’s most aggressive billionaires and best-funded governments, is a different question. The ground game in Indian telecom was largely a domestic contest. The orbital game is not.

There is also a domestic competitive layer that becomes harder to ignore. Through its Eutelsat stake, the Bharti Group is already inside the global LEO conversation in a way that no other Indian operator currently is. A Reliance LEO program would create, for the first time, a credible Indian-versus-Indian contest in space, mirroring the rivalry that has defined the country’s terrestrial telecom market for nearly a decade. Whichever side moves first on usable spectrum, ground stations, and a domestic terminal supply chain will set the early rules. Whichever side scales fastest will define how Indian consumers and enterprises eventually buy satellite connectivity.

The unknowns remain considerable. Talks are reportedly exploratory, no investment has been finalised, no acquisition target has been confirmed, and the eventual structure of the constellation business has not been set. Regulatory clearances in India for commercial satellite communications, including spectrum allocation, are still being shaped, and the licensing framework is itself a work in progress. What appears settled is the direction. The country has decided it wants a domestic constellation, the largest private operator in the country is positioning to build or buy one, and the competitive map is being redrawn at altitude.

The previous chapter of Indian telecom was decided by who could lay the most fibre and acquire the most spectrum on the ground. The next one may be decided by who can claim the most useful slots in a sky that is starting to run out of room.
BCS Bureau