The Scope of Satellite, Challenges & Way Forward

During the recently held TLF 5G conference by Voice and Data that was held in New Delhi last month, Rahul Vatts, Director of OneWeb in India and Chief Regulatory Officer, Airtel gave a keynote session on the scope of Satellite, Satellite communication and the latest developments in the Space sector.

Rahul mentioned that the world is still unrepresented when it comes to satellites. “I think the biggest problem today is that nearly 52% of the world still does not have internet access. That is one big indicator. In spite of 20-25 years of 2G, 3G, 4G, and even 5G. The fact is the world is still unrepresented. And out of that nearly 20% of the fixed broadband is still at a speed below 10 Mbps, so when we talk about 5G, the fact is even ubiquitous coverage of 4G is not available. Even when available, speeds are quite slow. Also, a large part of businesses are now going on the cloud. So we are moving towards enterprises, and enterprises are working on the cloud. So if you are on the cloud, and are going to access your data, you require much more stable broadband connectivity. Everybody talks about industry 4.0, but that is not going to happen if we don't have connectivity ubiquitous across the world.

LEO - Low Earth Orbit basically means that you are trying to place a satellite at around 1200 kilometers above Earth's surface as against a normal geostationary satellite, which used to be around 36,000 kilometers. The advantage is very low latency and higher speeds. LEO satellites are then able to cover the entire globe with a certain number and at very low latency and a very high speed. So wherever 4G or 5G are not reaching, you will always have a satellite reaching completely. It's also a good solution for rural connectivity gaps. Even a country like the US has got huge coverage gaps.

What are these satellites going to do? Basically, there are three basic use cases. One is to go down to the public sector agencies, which largely covered the manufacturing facilities and healthcare facilities, it can cover the traditional buyers, which are maritime and air and then of course, the public utility energy companies, which are spread across large swaths of land. So, these are the basic areas that are going to get connected.

Rahul talked about OneWeb. He said OneWeb is already built as LTE network. "We are a beam-centric configuration, we are basically ready for 5G type features - a next generation satellite. We are going to have data rates greater than 100 Mbps per user. We are going to support mobility even at speeds greater than 500 kilometers per hour. That is the amount of latency and the stability you will get in the overall context. Of course we come with the advanced pricing features. And we can also differentiate the quality of services each individual user or a b2b enterprise is going to get".

OneWeb is a company which has been promoted by Bharti group. Currently our biggest partner is the UK Government. The Eutelsat merger once it happens hopefully around the first quarter of next year, we are going to have the French government becoming a part of the venture, Bharti being the largest shareholder out of the entire lot.

We are committed in India to covering every single square inch from day one. Whenever we power up, we're going to cover the entire country. We are working with our distribution partner Hughes to split the services in the country. As far as use cases, strategically we are already in touch with the Ministry of Defense for a large part of our usage. We will also work along with operators for connecting the backhaul.

We have tried to work with the government of India and NSIL in actually sending some of the OneWeb satellites through NSIL. And the first lot of those satellites should hopefully power up into space starting mid-October 2022.

The Prime Minister has announced a new spacecom policy and we are all hoping for major reforms to now get a leg up. The entire ecosystem is now getting ready for something big in the space sector.

Satellites are covering large part of societal applications, we still have satellite coverage for phones in some Defence areas. Of course television, the DTH is part of a satellite journey. So some part of satellite is already being used. Now we have to move to more strategic areas, applications that require low latency like AR VR.

Clearly, we are a very minuscule part of the world economy. India's share in global space economy is just 2.6%. We have got a large opportunity available in space and that is the pie we are looking at. That is why the rush of so many start-ups in the entire space ecosystem. Recently at a conference in Bangalore, surprisingly, there were more than 30 to 40 start-ups all powered up to daily support the space ecosystem.

On the policy front, the NDCP was quite visionary it already visualized that satellite is going to be a way forward, in addition to the terrestrial. And so it is one of the paths which has been clearly recognized, particularly considering the needs. We may have a need for backhaul, for disaster, for defense needs, but what's important to note is that it is a nascent industry that requires support to be able to grow.

There is a lot of long talk about auctioning off spectrum etc. If you start the industry with auctions, I don't think the space industry is going to ever power up in this country.

As far as challenges in the regulatory space, We require spectrum to grow, we also require that there should be complete privatization of how the satellites work. A satellite comes with a common set of the spectrum and that spectrum is common throughout the world. So you cannot have an India-specific charter for a satellite system, because the same satellite system is supporting the entire world. Much larger coordination is required. If we require the satellite space to grow, we can get a lot of opportunities in education in covering large areas, which are still unconnected.

In terms of the way forward, I think the big item out here is to get 100% FDI in the sector. It allows a lot of investments to flow in the sector. And of course, promotes the ease of doing business. Currently, the procedures for investing in the country, getting approvals, for launching these systems, are multiple processes and quite tedious. I think that needs to basically change.