Airtel Makes Big Announcement. Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal said the telecom industry is under tremendous stress, but he is hopeful that the government would take adequate steps to ensure the sector remains vibrant and isn’t reduced to a duopoly.

“I don’t know what norms the government will apply but I know it’s concerned about the sector, and I’m hopeful that something should happen,” Mittal said Thursday.

The Bharti founder’s comments came amid fresh concerns around loss-making Vodafone Idea’s survival chances amid the latter’s dwindling cash balances coupled with its continuing inability to line up funding or raise tariffs in a fiercely competitive market.

Mittal had recently said at the Qatar Economic Forum that it would be tragic if India went down to just a two-telecom player market as this large country deserved at least three private sector telcos.

He, though, said that while mobile tariffs should go up, Airtel won't raise prices unilaterally. “Industry ARPU at around Rs 130 is way below the pre-Jio Rs 220-230 levels and is totally unsustainable, but any decision to raise tariffs can’t be unilateral since Airtel is already at premium pricing…so we have to be mindful of the market, but market repair has to take place.”

Turning to group satellite venture, OneWeb’s ambitions in the emerging internet-from-space segment and upcoming competition from Elon Musk’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos-founded Amazon, Mittal said that much like current three-operator telecoms sector, there is adequate room for three low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations to operate in India, and that Bharti-backed OneWeb “welcomed competition”.

OneWeb is setting up a global constellation of LEO satellites that will be leveraged to offer fast internet-from-spaces services worldwide. It is preparing to deliver high-speed, low-latency satellite broadband services in rural and remote regions globally including India, aiming to take on Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper.

Mittal said OneWeb is close to securing landing rights and market access from the Indian authorities, which will pave the way for it planned rollout of satellite internet services in India by June 2022.

OneWeb, he said, at some point “would have ambitions to go public but that was still some time away”.

Mittal expects OneWeb to "break even within 24 months of full commercial operations," on grounds that running costs are low and the satellite industry works on very high Ebitda margins. He, though, said satellite services would be expensive, but OneWeb is in talks with Isro and tech companies, including some from Israel, to price user access satellite terminals more affordably at around $500-600 from the current range of $1,000-2,000.

Mittal, who is also OneWeb’s executive chairman, said the Bharti Group-backed LEO satellite communications company would raise some more capital in July, and is “in advanced conversations” with potential investors. “We’ll raise some amount of money in July through strategic participation to get the right candidates on the shareholder table.”

OneWeb’s plans to raise more cash come just days after Bharti Global, the overseas arm of Bharti Enterprises, decided to pump in an extra $500 million into the LEO satellite communications company, which once concluded will raise Bharti’s over investment in the satellite broadband venture to $1 billion. OneWeb’s has already raised $2.4 billion.

Mittal was speaking to reporters on a day OneWeb, co-owned by Bharti Global and the UK government, launched another batch of 36 satellites by Arianespace from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia.

The launch marked the conclusion of its ‘Five to 50’ mission that would take OneWeb’s total in-orbit constellation to 254 satellites. These would form part of OneWeb’s 648 LEO satellite fleet that will deliver high-speed, low-latency connectivity across the UK, Canada, Alaska, Northern Europe, Greenland, and the Arctic Region.

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