Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has approved Eutelsat OneWeb to provide commercial satellite broadband services. The space regulator said that OneWeb India is the first company authorised for enabling an India-focused Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation. It is necessary to get IN-SPACe approval, GMPCS licence and spectrum from the Department of Telecom (DoT) to offer satcom services in India.
Eutelsat OneWeb is a subsidiary of Eutelsat Group and it provides broadband services using LEO satellites. One of the biggest shareholders in this company is Sunil Bharti Mittal’s Bharti Enterprises The company is headquartered in London, with offices in Virginia, US.
The latest approval means that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio subsidiary which has been dominating broadband services so far, may be left behind in the race of providing satellite-based internet services. The third player in this race is Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The Ambani-owned satellitebased giga fiber service called JioSpaceFiber aims to provide high speed broadband services to previously inaccessible geographies within the country. Until now, it was believed that Mukesh Ambani will be the first one to do that but in a major push to Sunil Bharti Mittal, a low earth orbit (LEO) satellite firm backed by him has received necessary regulatory approvals
