India’s Reliance plans its own LEO constellation

• India’s Reliance Industries has finally filed IPO papers for its tech division, Jio Platforms
• But the company’s chairman, Mukesh Ambani, also discussed various tech-related plans
• It includes a sovereign low-earth orbit (LEO) constellation for India, a market for which Starlink has high hopes 

When Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani announced last Friday that the long-anticipated IPO process for its digital tech division Jio Platforms, which has India’s largest mobile operator Reliance Jio as its crown jewel, was finally underway and that the appropriate paperwork was being filed that day, the headline machine blew up. 

But that particular bit of news put some of the other announcements that Ambani made to RIL’s shareholders somewhat in the shadows – and he shared plenty, including plans for RIL’s very own fleet of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites. 

Having laid out various plans for expansion in communications and media services, technology development (including, of course, AI) and more, he told attendees at the RIL annual general meeting that there is a new “frontier” that is now in the company’s sights – satellite communications. 

“Jio connected India on the ground – now we must connect India from the skies,” stated Ambani. 

“There are still remotest villages, island communities, and border outposts where the Jio network cannot reach. For them, satellite connectivity will be the bridge to the rest of India. Jio is evaluating the development of a sovereign low-earth orbit satellite constellation for India,” added the chairman. 

But of course these things take time – it will be years before any Reliance satellites would be in orbit. In the meantime, “we are also partnering with the leading global constellation providers by leasing satellite capacity, so that we can accelerate service availability while building our own long-term sovereign capability,” he noted, without mentioning any specific partners. Reliance has, though, previously brokered a deal with Starlink to offer the SpaceX unit’s satellite broadband services to its customers across India once Starlink has the required licence.  

Starlink, meanwhile, wants to get its services to as many Indian users as quickly as possible and wants to sell directly as well as through partners – it has also previously struck a deal with India’s second-largest telco, Bharti Airtel. 

It’s interesting to note, then, that recent reports from India suggest companies that gain the requisite licences for satellite communications services might still then need security clearance from the government before they can legally start operations, as we reported earlier this week. Any such move would seem to favour companies that are developing sovereign satellite constellations that are run by Indian companies and dedicated to the delivery of services in the country. 

In the meantime, Reliance, as it does with most developments, is seeking to accelerate its own time-to-market process. According to local reports, it plans to run a constellation of 1,650 LEO satellites that would be able to provide satellite broadband services to the whole country as well as direct-to-device (D2D) services that connect regular smartphones when they are beyond the reach of terrestrial radio access networks. The budget being set aside for the Reliance LEO network rollout is believed to be between $10bn and $15bn, with Ambani hoping to have the Reliance space network up and running before the end of this decade. 

The chairman told shareholders that the dual approach of partnering while constructing a dedicated sovereign LEO network “will enable Jio to meet India’s connectivity needs faster, while laying the foundation for the Indian satellite broadband platform of global scale. To anchor this ambition, Jio is also building its own ground station infrastructure in India. These ground stations will support our partner constellations, as well as our own future satellites, creating an end-to-end satellite broadband ecosystem from space to ground. With this initiative, Jio is strengthening India’s atma nirbharta [self-reliance] in space, placing India firmly on the global satellite broadband services map. All these initiatives show that the best of Jio is yet to come.

And RIL has the economic scale to achieve this. The Jio Platforms IPO, which will see only a small slice of the company’s shares floated on the public exchange (just 2.5% of the total equity), is set to raise around $4bn, but there is plenty of cashflow that can be utilised, as well as used as collateral to raise funds. 

In the financial year that ended in March 2026, Jio Platforms generated revenues of $15.5bn, up by 14.6% year on year, while earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) reached $8bn, up by 18.8%, and profit after tax was just above $3.2bn, up 15.1%. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV