
The Department of Telecommunications has till date received “no communication” regarding satellite broadband from Amazon, Bharti group backed-OneWeb or Elon Musk’s SpaceX, it’s said in response to a Right to Information query.
The DoT’s response came on queries seeking to understand whether it had, since 2018, received any communication or proposal for fixing of satellite broadband in India from Amazon, OneWeb, SpaceX or any of their subsidiaries.
DoT officials also confirmed the event and said that thus far none of those companies had come to them with a “concrete proposal” on starting satellite broadband within the country, although there had been some initial informal discussions between the varied departments of the telecom ministry.
In response to the consultation paper, OneWeb had said that the govt should assess the extent of license authorisation fees, spectrum charge, and custom taxes and “define the extent of levies to a pure cost-recovery basis”.
“It should even be noted that regarding spectrum fees, satellite operators would really enjoy a special spectrum fees formula for gateways operating several antennas using an equivalent spectrum. intrinsically operation requires huge bandwidth, but the spectrum is merely assigned for a specific location only and therefore the spectrum denial isn’t bigger using several antennas versus one antenna,” it had responded.
On the opposite hand, Bharti Airtel had submitted that existing regulatory charges should be rationalized and unified into one single levy, and government should recover only the value of administering licensing activities.