Jio partners with SES to offer satellite internet services in India

Reliance Jio has announced a joint venture (JV) partnership with SES, a telecommunications company that will bring satellite internet services to India.

Once the service is operational, the Jio-SES partnership will offer satellite internet connectivity, along with Jio’s mobile telecom services and fibre broadband internet services across India.

The JV named Jio Space Technology Limited will operate as a 51-49 JV between Jio Platforms Limited and SES.

Currently, SES operates a host of satellites in Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Middle Earth Orbit (MEO) to offer satellite-based data and communications services to its clients. Jio will use the SES-12 GEO and O3b-mPOWER MEO satellites to beam the internet down to Earth. According to Jio, this partnership will see internet services capable of up to 100 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) bandwidth to be served to consumers and enterprises in the country.

Jio has entered a nascent sector of satellite internet services, and India is a potentially large market. Many companies are already targeting India to launch their satellite internet operations, including Bharti Airtel, which has been set up to begin operations in partnership with OneWeb. Nelco is also in the running, partnering with Telesat to bring its services to India.

Among foreign operators, companies like Starlink, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, are also looking at India for their operation services.

Operators are banking on a constellation of satellites in the Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) to power their satellite telecommunication services, which is different from Jio and SES’ GEO, and MEO satellites.

The operation requires a few ground stations to operate and cover larger areas per satellite and remain stationary to the Earth surface but offer higher latency in their services, while LEO satellites are easier to launch and require multiple satellites in the relay and more ground stations, but offer lower latency connectivity, which might impact the overall quality of services.

Director of Reliance Jio, Akash Ambani, said that while the operator will be launching satellite internet services, simultaneously the company will expand their fibre broadband services in India.

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