Satellite Internet in India: How Starlink, OneWeb and Jio-SES Differ, and What the Government Can and Cannot Verify

Three companies hold Indian licences to sell satellite broadband from non-geostationary constellations: Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb (backed by Bharti Airtel) and Jio’s satellite arm, which buys capacity from its joint venture with SES. None can sell commercially yet. The government says all three are “at broadly the same regulatory stage”, with security assessments under way before any of them can seek spectrum (PIB release of October 8, 2026).

This page explains the engineering behind that wait. It covers how each system actually moves data, what a ground gateway is, what the government is asking for, and what can and cannot be checked from the ground. It is the technical companion to our news timeline of the Starlink row and our guide to how Starlink works. Commentary is kept in boxes labelled “Our take”, so you can separate the facts from our reading of them. Figures are as of October 12, 2026.

The three systems side by side

Sources: MediaNama on Starlink’s authorisations, APNIC on OneWeb’s constellation, MEA Tech Watch and Inc42 on OneWeb’s Indian gateways and clearance, TelecomTalk on Jio-SES, and Wikipedia on mPOWER’s orbit. Gateway locations other than Starlink’s count are press-reported, not official.

What a ground gateway is

A satellite cannot connect you to the internet by itself. It relays signals. Somewhere on the ground, those signals have to be turned back into ordinary internet traffic, and that place is a gateway: a fenced site with several large dishes, radio equipment, modems, routers and a fibre link out. OneWeb calls its gateways “Satellite Network Portals”, and a separate “point of presence” (PoP) is where the traffic then joins the wider internet.

The gateway matters for security because it is a physical chokepoint. Everything a user sends, unless it takes a shortcut that bypasses the gateway, passes through one building that has an address. That is where a government can ask for lawful interception equipment, where it can block websites, and where it can switch service off.

Three ways a packet reaches the internet

Altitude sets the minimum delay before any other factor applies. The chart shows the physics floor for a satellite directly overhead of both the user and the gateway.

Now the routing, system by system.

Starlink: a laser mesh

Starlink satellites can pass traffic to each other by laser, so a packet can leave your terminal, hop across several satellites, and come down at a gateway far from you. That is a major engineering advantage in places with few gateways. It is also the heart of the Indian objection.

The reported Indian conditions bar user traffic from routing through foreign gateways or through inter-satellite links in a way that avoids Indian infrastructure (MediaNama). The rule can be met in software, by telling the network to land Indian traffic at Indian gateways. But the Takshashila Institution argues that it is hard to verify, because ground monitoring cannot see what happens in orbit (Takshashila). Starlink says it has built India-specific controls and that Indian user data stays in India.

OneWeb: a mirror that needs a gateway

OneWeb’s first-generation satellites are “bent pipes”. A satellite receives data from a gateway on Ka-band and retransmits it to users on Ku-band, with no processing on board (eoPortal). Think of it as a mirror in the sky that changes colour. It also has no links between satellites, so it can only serve a user while it can see both the user and a gateway.

Why it was built this way is partly regulatory. OneWeb has said that regulatory concerns about where a country’s traffic travels were the main reason it forwent inter-satellite links (SpaceNews). Its India gateways are reported at Mehsana in Gujarat and Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu, with points of presence in Mumbai and Chennai.

Why it is less efficient.

• Gateway-bound coverage. It needs ground infrastructure wherever it serves. APNIC notes the lack of inter-satellite links means extra gateways must be built for remote places such as French Polynesia, Fiji and Mauritius. Its network had 40 gateways and 29 points of presence in August 2025.
• A higher orbit. At 1,200 km, its delay floor is about 16 ms, against about 7 ms at Starlink’s altitude.
• Fixed beams. Its user link uses 16 fixed beams per satellite, against steerable phased-array beams on newer designs, which, as we read it, gives it less flexibility to concentrate capacity where users are.
• Handover swings. APNIC’s measurements show latency jumping when traffic switches between sparsely placed gateways. In one case, round-trip time fell from about 100 ms to about 50 ms at a handover. That is one terminal in the US Midwest, so it should not be generalised.

Why it may suit the government better. Because the satellite cannot send traffic anywhere except down to a gateway in its view, a packet entering in India has to come down at an Indian gateway. Control comes from the architecture, not from a rule that has to be enforced.

Jio-SES: a high orbit and a gateway

Jio’s satellite broadband runs on SES’s constellations: the geostationary SES-12 and the O3b mPOWER constellation in medium Earth orbit at about 8,000 km, which works in Ka-band. The venture, Jio Space Technology, is 51% Jio and 49% SES, with Jio as anchor customer on a capacity agreement worth about US$100 million (Business Wire). Gateways were reported operating at Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh in July 2025.

At 8,000 km the round-trip floor is about 108 ms before any other delay. SES has described its service as enterprise and carrier grade, in contrast to Starlink’s consumer-grade offering, and says 5G backhaul is central to Jio’s network planning (TelecomTalk).

What the government is asking for

India’s Department of Telecommunications issued security conditions for satellite licensees on May 5, 2025. We could not find the circular itself, so the list below comes from press and legal summaries, including MediaNama, The420 and Business Standard. Check the official text before relying on the details.

Who is connecting

• Terminals must be registered and authenticated, foreign devices verified, and live location made available when required.
• Services must be geofenced, with the ability to deny access in sensitive zones.
• Areas within 50 km of land borders and up to 200 nautical miles from the coast are special monitoring zones.

Where traffic goes

• Each gateway site needs its own security clearance, and key systems must be in India: gateways, network control centres, interception and monitoring systems, and DNS.
• Indian user traffic must pass through Indian gateways, and must not be routed abroad.
• Indian data may not be copied or decrypted outside the country.

What must be possible

• Lawful interception and monitoring before commercial operation begins, with session metadata collected.
• Blocking of prohibited websites, and suspension of service for a user or an area on the instruction of security agencies.

Industrial

• At least 20% of ground equipment made in India within five years, and support for the NavIC navigation system.

What can and cannot be verified

Rules are only as good as the ability to check them. This diagram shows where India can look for itself and where it has to take the operator’s word.

What India can check. It can inspect the gateway: where it is, what equipment it has, whether interception systems are connected. It can require a registry of terminals. And independent observers can detect that a satellite is transmitting over an area: researchers at Ohio State and UT Austin have received Starlink downlink signals (Ohio State also OneWeb’s) with a software-defined radio, a consumer Ku-band antenna and a low-noise converter, and used them for positioning (Ohio State). Those signals were reverse-engineered from measurements, not from a published specification.

What India cannot independently check.

• What satellites do in orbit. Routing decisions over laser links happen in space, under the operator’s software.
• Who is really using a terminal. A registry records who bought a terminal, not who is holding it. In Ukraine, Russian forces were allegedly obtaining terminals through intermediaries in ex-Soviet republics and Dubai, according to war correspondents and media reports (Al Jazeera).
• Whether geofencing holds. It relies on the terminal’s own location and the operator’s servers. Takshashila argues geofencing has proven unreliable, citing the Starlink devices found in Manipur and in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Whether those terminals actually connected is disputed.
• The operator’s own records. Logs, customer data and keys sit in the company’s systems.

The February 2026 episode in Ukraine shows the other side of this. SpaceX blocked every Starlink terminal located in Ukraine, then restored only those on whitelists updated every 24 hours, and shut down terminals moving faster than 90 km per hour (Al Jazeera). It proves the operator can control access by location and identity. It also shows who holds that control: the operator, acting on a request.

The harder question: an uncooperative or compelled operator

The question we are asked most is what happens if an operator, or the government behind it, wanted covert access, and how anyone would know. We want to be clear first: we have seen no evidence that SpaceX, Eutelsat or SES has done anything of the kind. This is a question about structure, and it applies to any foreign-run network.

Three structural facts make it hard to answer.

1. You cannot prove a negative from outside. An auditor can show what a gateway does. Showing that nothing else is happening elsewhere, in orbit or in the company’s data centres, would require inspection access that no regulator has.
2. Control sits with the operator’s home jurisdiction. Takshashila argues that US leverage over SpaceX, through contracts and licences, could in theory be used to push the company to share Indian data or change coverage. The paper frames this as a hypothetical. It also reports that Starlink declined an Indian request for user details in a smuggling case, citing data privacy laws.
3. Evidence would come late, if at all. The realistic ways of finding out are traffic anomalies at the gateway, forensic work on seized terminals, leaks and disclosures, not live proof.

Why tracking signals across India is so hard

Detecting a terminal from its radio emissions sounds simple. At India’s scale it is not.

A Starlink terminal transmits to satellites in the Ku band, between 14.0 and 14.5 GHz, through a narrow beam pointed at the sky. Very little energy travels sideways along the ground. A receiver has to be close to the terminal, or inside the beam path, to hear it. A sensor on the other side of a hill hears nothing. This is our explanation from how phased-array antennas work, not a figure published by any operator.

Russia has claimed a detector called Borshchevik that could locate Starlink terminals up to 10 km away with an accuracy near 60 metres. Ukrainian experts questioned those figures, and the claims trace back to the manufacturer as relayed by media. We found no independent test (Technology.org). Take the 10 km range as a generous assumption and look at the arithmetic.

Covering India’s roughly 3.29 million km2 with 10 km circles needs more than 10,000 sensors even with no overlap and no terrain, and the border zone alone runs along thousands of kilometres of mountain, forest and coast. Meanwhile, passive receivers can see that a satellite is lighting up an area, but not who is connected or what is being sent.

Why satellite phones never became a civilian product in India

Satellite phones are sold to civilians in many countries. In India they are not freely available. They are not banned outright, but possessing or using one requires prior approval, a licence or a No Objection Certificate, from the Department of Telecommunications. The law invoked includes the Telecommunications Act, 2023 and the Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933. Thuraya and Iridium are not authorised for use. Satellite connectivity through BSNL tied to Inmarsat is permitted under strict conditions. Any satellite phone brought into the country must be declared at customs and backed by approval, and non-compliance can lead to confiscation, fines or arrest (Business Today).

The reason is monitoring. Satellite phones work independently of terrestrial networks, so conventional interception does not reach them. The rules hardened after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when the attackers used Thuraya satellite phones to coordinate with handlers in Pakistan (The420). The420 describes the phones as UAE-based Thuraya devices. Our inference is that calls on such a network are handled by gateways outside India, where Indian agencies cannot intercept them.

What Jio is planning

Jio’s public plan is a staged one, and most of the dates below are about waiting.

• February 2022. Jio Platforms and SES form Jio Space Technology, 51% and 49%, with a capacity deal worth about US$100 million.
• October 27, 2023. Jio shows JioSpaceFiber at India Mobile Congress, a demonstration at four remote sites (Gir in Gujarat, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Nabarangpur in Odisha and ONGC’s site at Jorhat in Assam), using SES’s O3b and O3b mPOWER satellites. No pricing was announced (TelecomTalk).
• July 2025. SES says gateways are running at Kadapa, proofs of concept are under way, and it is “just waiting for final regulatory approval in India”, hoping to launch by the end of the year. Commercial traffic is not yet permitted.
• May 2026. Reports say the service still has not launched commercially, pending final security clearance.
• May 6, 2026. The Economic Times, as summarised by NiftyTrader, reports that Jio Platforms is evaluating a multi-billion-dollar entry into low-orbit satellite communications, possibly including acquisitions. It cites unnamed sources and gives no timeline, and Jio has not confirmed it.
• October 8, 2026. At India Mobile Congress, Akash Ambani said Jio is making “rapid progress” on an indigenous satellite broadband technology stack (Business Today).

In short: Jio’s near-term launch depends on the same security clearance as the others, through a medium-orbit system aimed at enterprises and backhaul. A low-orbit consumer service of its own, if it happens, is years away by the nature of building one, and is so far a report, not an announcement.

What to watch next

• Spectrum. The Digital Communications Commission approved most of TRAI’s satcom recommendations on September 3, 2026. The framework still needs Union Cabinet approval, and operators cannot start commercial service until spectrum is formally assigned (MediaNama).
• Security clearances. Each of the three, plus each gateway site, still needs one. This is the step the ministry says is under way.
• Direct-to-device. Starlink has reapplied for a second-generation system of nearly 30,000 satellites that includes direct-to-device capability. Takshashila argues that this would make gateway-based localisation largely ineffective, and TRAI has not settled the interference questions (MediaNama).
• Monitoring capacity. Whether the National SATCOM Monitoring Facility is ever built decides how much India can verify for itself.

If you want to see what your own connection does today, our Global Latency Checker measures delay from your browser, and our guide to what a good ping is explains how to read it.