By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, October 19: Even as India’s Minister of Telecom Jyotiraditya Scindia cleared the path for Starlink’s entry into India to provide satellite-based internet, experts both at home and aboard warned about the security risk that a system linked to the US military could pose to India.
Scindia recently announced that the spectrum (electromagnetic frequencies) for the proposed satellite-based broadband internet system will be allocated “administratively” and not through an “auction.” This decision came shortly after the Starlink owner, Elon Musk, criticised the auction route proposed by Mukesh Ambani, owner of the rival Indian telecom company, Reliance Jio.
Musk had argued that it was international practice (as per the International Telecommunication Union regulations) to award the spectrum administratively rather than by auction.
The ITU regulates satellite spectrum allocation to ensure rational, efficient, and economical use of this limited natural resource.
Reliance Jio’s Ambani argued in favour of auction to ensure a level playing field.
After listening to both sides, the Telecom Minister announced that the spectrum would be allocated administratively “as per Indian laws, and its pricing will be determined by the telecom watchdog.”
He further said that deviating from this approach to conduct an auction would set India apart from the rest of the world.
While Musk won hands down, it was a big loss for Ambani.
The Indian internet market is projected to have a 36% annual growth. The market is expected to reach US$ 1.9 billion by 2030.
India now has 42 million wired broadband internet users and 904 million telecom users on networks like 4G and 5G. India is the world’s second-biggest telecom market after China.
However, internet penetration in India has a long way to go. Penetration stood at only 52.4% in 2024. There are still 25,000 villages without internet. And even in urban cities, many areas don’t have fibre-based fast internet connection. Therefore, satellite-based internet will definitely help cover the entire country.
Be that as it may, there are some issues with the Starlink system. One is the high cost. This is not a big issue because Starlink does not charge the same amount in all countries.
The really worrying issue is a possible threat to national security because Starlink is in the super sensitive Indian telecommunication domain.
Nationalist Indian commentators are asking: Given Starlinks’ close links with the US military, would not India be compromising its security by allowing it operate in India? Would India be able to control Starlink when India-US relations deteriorate? Could Starlink cease its services on the orders of the US Government? Would Indian regulators be able to keep an eye on the use of the Starlink system and ensure that it is not used for espionage or for tampering with vital Indian communications? In India, a permit is needed even to us a satellite phone. People have been arrested for using a satellite phone.
Need for Safeguards
In his paper entitled Cyber Threat Landscape Analysis for Starlink Assessing Risks and Mitigation Strategies in the Global Satellite Internet Infrastructure, Karwan Mustafa Kareem of the University of Sulaimani, in Iraq, says that the dangers from Starlink are the following: Denial-of-Service (DoS); Man-in-the-Middle (MitM); Jamming; Spoofing, and Physical tampering.
Kareem emphasizes the importance of encryption algorithms, authentication protocols, and intrusion detection systems in safeguarding satellite networks against unauthorized access and data breaches. He stresses the need for continuous monitoring and threat intelligence sharing to detect and respond to emerging threats effectively. India has to make sure that it has all these safeguards in place.
India had asked Starlink about its shareholders to know if any country in the neighbourhood with which it was at odds was in the list. India was particularly worried about China and Pakistan, the latter believed to be in cahoots with China. Starlink replied in the negative, paving the way to its entry into India.
The Starlink project’s implications for international and national Security were delineated by researchers Yan Jiajie and Yu Nanping. (See: https://interpret.csis.org/translations/the-u-s-starlink-project-and-its-implications-from-the-perspective-of-international-and-national-security/)
Yan and Yu maintain that the growing deployment of Starlink satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) will give the company control over a large amount of data, challenging the security of other countries.
Close Links with US Military
Starlink has military applications and the company has intimate relations with the US Air Force and Army. Starlink allows the connection of high-altitude weapons to a global satellite communications network.
More connected data and intelligence will lead to a more flexible and more effective combat model. Low-orbit satellites can be combined with terrestrial 5G networks to form a unified whole, the authors say.
If Starlink’s applications for satellite communications and transmission, satellite imaging, remote sensing and other services are used in the US military, they will further enhance the US military’s combat capabilities.
In March 2019, the US Air Force’s Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation Office signed a US$ 28 million contract with SpaceX (the mother company of Starlink) requiring the company to conduct military service demonstration and verification using the Starlink constellation.
In November 2019, the US Air Force awarded SpaceX a contract called the Defence Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI), which aims to explore the use of commercial low-orbit communication satellite constellations to build a globally resilient, highly available, high-bandwidth, low-latency communication infrastructure for the US Air Force in space to support various Air Force combat operations.
In May 2020, the US Army signed a three-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with SpaceX to test the feasibility of connecting the broadband network provided by Starlink’s low-orbit internet constellation to the military communication network.
Space X launched the Falcon 9 rocket carrying more than 20 tons of payload into Low-Earth Orbit. The controlled recovery and soft landing of the first stage of the rocket and its reuse was achieved, greatly reducing launch costs. SpaceX has also undertaken the development and launch of the Dragon spacecraft.
On March 14, 2017, SpaceX won a US$ 96.5 million contract with the US Air Force to launch GPS-III, the next generation of Global Positioning System satellites. SpaceX is to provide launch vehicle production, mission integration, and rocket launching, as well as follow-up value assessment and original research work for GPS-III.
On October 5, 2020, the DOD’s Space Development Agency (SDA) and SpaceX signed a U.S. $149 million contract that includes construction of four ballistic missile and hypersonic missile detection and tracking satellites.
In October 2020, It was announced that SpaceX would get a US$ 149 million contract to build four military satellites for the “Tracking Layer Tranche 0” of the United States’ “Next Generation Space System,” which will be used to provide early warning and tracking information for defence against ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles.
Each Starlink satellite can transmit high-definition pictures and videos it takes over a war zone to front-line commanders. At the same time, the huge amount of data collected by UAVs over the battlefield will no longer need to be compressed locally, but will be transmitted in raw form directly to a command centre on the other side of the earth via Starlink, and then analyzed by supercomputers to extract useful data and analyze the battlefield situation more precisely, enabling commanders in the war zone to make decisions more quickly and accurately.
On January 3, 2020, the US used an UAV to take out Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. On November 27 of the same year, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, head of Iran’s nuclear program and its chief nuclear scientist, was assassinated near Tehran. These actions were made possible by the global high-speed communication and space-air coordination capabilities achieved via satellite networks.
If Starlink is used on a large scale in the military field in the future, it will further enhance the US military’s satellite communication and unmanned combat capabilities, and be a threat to the national security of rival States, Yan Jiajie and Yu Nanping maintain.
Analyst Zhou Yuzhe points out that the Starlink project intends to commandeer frequency and orbital resources. Since the International Telecommunication Union’s principle for obtaining orbits and spectrum is “first come, first served,” once Starlink has occupied a large amount of orbital and spectrum resources, it will compress the room for others.
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