CIOTech Outlook Team | Monday, 30 June 2025, 09:41 IST
American satellite giants Starlink and Amazon Kuiper have signed their first commercial deals with Indian VSAT players, including Hughes Communications, Nelco, and Inmarsat, marking a significant step toward launching enterprise and government satellite broadband services.
These partnerships come even before the official allocation of satellite spectrum in India, signaling a proactive approach to capturing the market.
Both companies are adopting a hybrid go-to-market strategy, with an enterprise (B2B) and government (B2G) focus with an eye to the retail consumer market. Starlink and Kuiper will target a mix of go-to-market approach in India.
They are going to offer service directly and are also forging partnerships to sell through partners. Starlink, for instance, has already announced a partnership with Reliance Jio and Airtel, which is the sell-through model. This approach contrasts with Eutelsat OneWeb, which will rely on a sell-through model via Indian partners.
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Starlink is set to provide direct-to-customer links through its webpage in near future. Kuiper will also be the same and will not depend on single master distributor and they are not going to do it by themselves as well.
These sectors are expected to benefit significantly from the higher bandwidth offered by Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems. Companies and government departments run with less connectivity, but they want retail automation, remote monitoring, and AI operations. Defence is also a huge potential user with higher bandwidth, which can be enabled only by LEO satellite-based broadband connectivity.
Hughes Communications India president, CEO, and managing director Shivaji Chatterjee said the company is working with LEO satellite companies. “Being a major incumbent, we will surely be amongst their major go-to-market partners in B2B and B2G segments’’, he added.
