Reliance pressed India’s telecom watchdog on Friday to reconsider its plan not to auction satellite spectrum but to simply allocate it, in a fresh clash with Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia last month said the government would allocate spectrum administratively in line with global trends but a final notification on how spectrum is given out will come after Trai gives its feedback.

Musk’s Starlink has expressed interest in launching in India following a successful launch in Africa, which left local players bruised by low broadband prices and favours the government’s approach to allocating spectrum.

Ravi Gandhi, a top Reliance policy executive, urged Trai to review the decision, noting in an open house discussion hosted by Trai that the move to allocate spectrum administratively is “the most discriminatory method of assigning any kind of government resource”.

Starlink argument

Starlink India executive Parnil Urdhwareshe said India’s allocation plan was “forward-looking”.

The justification of administrative assignment is techno-economic — that satellite spectrum is shared and enforcing an exclusionary auction mechanism makes the entire satellite ecosystem “worse off”, Urdhwareshe said.

“Users choose Starlink because their current options are unavailable, unreliable or too expensive. Now some commentators are explicitly arguing that those users should continue to be stuck with services that either don’t exist or are too unreliable or expensive,” he said.

Analysts say a spectrum auction, requiring much more investment, would likely deter foreign rivals.