The Starlink listings, by multiple sellers, were found on the platform IndiaMART, which is a popular platform for large sellers selling to businesses. Photo: dir.indiamart.com
Customer terminals for the satellite internet service Starlink, served by Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, are being listed for sale on a prominent Indian business-to-business retail platform, in a potential security risk. Starlink, which allows its customers to browse the internet by connecting to a series of low earth orbit satellites, is not yet authorised to provide its services in India.
The listings, by multiple sellers, were found on the platform IndiaMART, which is a popular platform for large sellers selling to businesses. It is unclear whether these terminals were genuine, and how the sellers would allow customers to pay Starlink’s monthly fees from India — prices for the equipment ranged from ₹15,000 to ₹97,000 in a sample of listings. A spokesperson for SpaceX did not respond to a query by The Hindu, nor did the Department of Telecommunications. Listed sellers did not return calls from The Hindu when reached through an IndiaMART facilitated call-forwarding facility.
Some listings were removed from IndiaMART shortly after The Hindu reached out to the firm for comments, but others remain still. “The content integrated and made available by the advertiser/supplier is on its own through a self-edit tool available on the Website without any intervention of Indiamart,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed response.
“In case of any breach of terms and conditions by sellers, we will not hesitate to take action and disable the impugned listing from our website, if brought to our notice through a court order or notified agency.”
India has among the most stringent prohibitions in the world against unapproved telecommunications, a result of terrorist threats and a hostile neighborhood. Travellers are routinely warned to not bring satellite phones into India without written approval from the Department of Telecommunications.
Officials have long worried of the possibilities of unmonitored internet communications by terrorists or infiltrators in border areas, leading to blanket restrictions that have sometimes ensnared others in national security investigations.
For instance, in 2022, Fergus MacLeod, a senior executive at Saudi Aramco, was arrested and briefly held in jail for switching on a satellite phone he brought to India in Chamoli, Uttarakhand while on holiday.
Late last year, a fisherman from Kozhikode district was questioned for operating a satellite phone that he said was given to him by a friend in Oman for emergencies when at sea. Phone calls he made to numbers in India were flagged, and Mangaluru police called him for questioning.
What’s more, India remains one of the few countries in the world with restrictions even on WiFi hotspots, requiring every hotspot operator to validate a phone number for each device connecting to the internet. Foreign travellers often need a physical coupon issued to them at the airport to access hotspots there.
One of the main reasons that Starlink and OneWeb, its main competitor, have not yet been issued authorisations, is security clearances from the Ministry of Home Affairs. Authorities have sought assurances that all satellite internet traffic can be intercepted through equipment physically located in India, and that terminals brought in from abroad are restricted from functioning in Indian territory.
The Ministry of Home Affairs did not respond to The Hindu’s queries on whether Starlink has provided such assurances to the government’s satisfaction.
Satellite internet in India is typically only offered for business use, or as so-called backhaul in places such as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep, which have only recently been connected through an undersea cable network to the Indian mainland.
Firms such as Starlink promise increased bandwidth for remote users, as they have a large number of satellites in medium-to-low earth orbit, offering connectivity in remote areas without the humongous costs of building hundreds of kilometres of cable connectivity to enable this.