Through 2025 and into 2026, India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been quietly issuing the operational scaffolding for one of the most consequential connectivity decisions in a generation: the administrative allocation of spectrum for satellite communications. The legal basis was set in the Telecommunications Act, 2023, which for the first time in 138 years replaced the colonial-era Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. The pricing and assignment rules were anchored in recommendations from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued in late 2024. Together, they end a multi-year fight between India's terrestrial 5G incumbents and a new generation of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite operators — and they end it the right way.
What the rules actually do
Schedule I of the Telecommunications Act, 2023 lists categories of spectrum that may be assigned administratively rather than through auctions. Satellite-based services — including global mobile personal communication by satellite (GMPCS), national long-distance satellite services, broadcasting, and certain backhaul use cases — sit on that list. That legal choice was not foreordained. It was the product of a fierce lobbying battle.
On one side: Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, who argued that any spectrum capable of delivering broadband to retail customers should be auctioned, on the same competitive terms as terrestrial mobile bands. Their core concern was a level playing field: terrestrial operators have paid tens of thousands of crores for 5G airwaves and feared that satcom rivals would get cheaper input costs while addressing overlapping consumer markets.
On the other side: Eutelsat OneWeb, Hughes Communications, the Jio-SES joint venture, SpaceX's Starlink, and Amazon's Project Kuiper — all of whom argued, in line with International Telecommunication Union (ITU) practice, that satellite spectrum is inherently shared, non-exclusive and globally coordinated, and therefore unsuited to a winner-take-all national auction model.
The government sided with the satcom view. TRAI's 2024 recommendations proposed an administrative framework with a usage-based fee (reportedly around four percent of adjusted gross revenue, with floor charges per MHz and additional levies for urban consumer-segment use). DoT has been notifying the operational pieces — assignment durations, urban surcharges, security conditions — through 2025-2026.
Why administrative allocation is the right answer
Three reasons.
First, the physics. Auctions work when a resource is exclusive and rivalrous — a 5G mid-band channel in a specific city can only be used by one licensee at a time without harmful interference. Satellite spectrum is different. The same Ku-, Ka- and other bands are used by multiple operators simultaneously, coordinated through the ITU Radio Regulations and bilateral arrangements. Auctioning "exclusive" rights to spectrum that is not, in physics, exclusive would have produced a legal fiction with no operational meaning, and would have invited endless interference disputes.
Second, the policy goal. India still has, by widely cited estimates, several hundred million citizens without reliable broadband — concentrated in the very geographies where terrestrial fibre and 5G economics break down. Satellite broadband is the cheapest way to close that gap in this decade. Loading the new entrants with auction-style capex before they have lit up a single rural cell would have meant either delayed rollout, higher consumer prices, or both. Administrative pricing with a percentage-of-revenue model lets the government capture upside as operators scale, without front-loading a barrier to entry.
Third, the global benchmark. Almost every major jurisdiction — the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia — assigns satellite spectrum administratively, typically through technical filings rather than competitive bidding. Had India gone the other way, it would have been an outlier, and a costly one: international operators would have routed coverage around Indian airspace or delayed market entry, leaving Indian consumers with fewer choices.
Addressing the incumbents' legitimate concerns
None of this means Jio and Airtel's worries were frivolous. There is a real risk that, over time, satcom services could spill from genuinely rural and enterprise use cases into dense urban markets where terrestrial 5G operators have paid premium prices for exclusive spectrum. The right answer is not to misclassify the underlying resource, but to use targeted policy tools:
- A modest urban surcharge or differentiated per-subscriber charge for satellite consumer broadband in metro areas — reportedly part of the DoT framework.
- Clear interference-management and coexistence rules where satcom and terrestrial systems share adjacent bands.
- Sunset and review clauses that let the regulator revisit pricing if market conditions shift materially.
These are proportionate instruments. They protect competitive neutrality without distorting the fundamental nature of the resource.
What still needs watching
The framework's success will be judged on three things. One: speed. The Telecommunications Act, 2023 promised a faster, lighter-touch licensing regime than the Telegraph Act it replaced. If individual satcom authorisations still take 18 months and three security clearances, the win on paper will not translate to coverage on the ground.
Two: security conditions. Lawful interception, data localisation and gateway placement requirements are legitimate, but they must be calibrated. Overly prescriptive rules — for example, requiring all traffic to terrestrially exit through a single Indian gateway — can degrade service quality enough to erase the connectivity gains.
Three: review discipline. TRAI has committed to revisiting the pricing parameters periodically. That review should be evidence-based and transparent, not a recurring lobbying contest.
India has, on balance, made the right call. By distinguishing between exclusive and shared spectrum, by pricing through usage rather than upfront auction, and by aligning with global practice, the Telecommunications Act, 2023 framework chooses connectivity and competition over short-term auction revenue. For a country with hundreds of millions still offline, that is the better trade.