India to lead global telco QoS benchmarks, satcom rollouts: Jyotiraditya Scindia
Jyotiraditya Scindia
on Tuesday.
'It is my sincere hope that all our telco providers will move up the value chain in terms of quality of service beyond international benchmarks,' Scindia said at the
World Telecom Day 2025
event organised by the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
(TRAI).
He added that the telecom sector also needs to prioritise performance, transparency, and accountability, while also focusing on ensuring online safety and security.
The union minister also said that the industry is now seeing the emergence of new connectivity technology, i.e., satellite commuincations (satcom), and added that it will be complementary to the mobile services.
'TRAI has come out with its regulations for administrative assignment. Multiple players have availed of a license, and I am very confident that this roll out on the satellite network as well will probably be the fastest in the world in the years to come, growing from the current $2.3 billion market to almost a $20 billion market by 2028,' Scindia said, drawing parallels to the world's fastest roll-out of fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks in the nation.
This represents a 10x market value growth over the next three years. 'These are growth rates that you will probably not see anywhere else in the world,' the union minister said.
Satcom companies in the fray include Elon Musk-owned Starlink, Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon Kuiper, Bharti Group-backed Eutelsat OneWeb and Reliance Jio-SES, Globalstar, among others.
At stake is India's growing space economy, which is reckoned to have a potential to touch $44 billion by 2033, boosting its global share to 8% from 2% currently, as per space regulator IN-SPACe.
Starlink has recently received a letter of intent (LoI) from the
Department of Telecommunications
(DoT) for a satcom licence. It now needs clearance from the space regulator and allotment of airwaves before it can start services. Bharti-backed Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio-SES have already got all clearances to launch commercial satellite broadband services. They await airwaves.
'Focus on affordability'
Scindia said the affordability of mobile data has been a focus area of the
Ministry of Communications
, noting that costs have dropped from ₹287 per GB to just ₹9 GB today.
'We are today the cheapest data market in the world. The average cost of data (1 GB) across the world is $2.9. We have one of the most affordable data rates due to the public-private sector partnership that we have been able to scale up,' the union minister said.
Citing research reports, Scindia said the average monthly data usage per subscriber has grown by 349 times – from 61MB to about 21.5GB today. 'These statistics are unheard of in the world,' he added.
He underscored that the government is focusing on delivering connectivity anytime and anywhere in the country, citing the 4G and 5G saturation programmes, which have a financial outlay of ₹26,316 crore to connect about 27,000 villages.
'We have deployed 9,300 towers, and another 11,000 towers more will be installed. I must commend our private sector, which has led one of the fastest 5G rollouts across the world,' the union minister said.
Scindia said that in just 22 months, since the launch of fifth-generation (5G) services in October 22, 99% of India's districts, covering 82% of the population, are receiving 5G coverage.
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