Thirty-nine rupees

I was in Mumbai recently, running work calls and answering emails off my phone’s hotspot for two days. At the end of the trip, a notification told me what it had cost: ₹39 for 3 GB.

For reference, ₹39 in Mumbai is two vada pavs and some change. I had spent more on lunch than on the infrastructure that carried my working day 😁.

A few weeks before I was on the Shatabdi, laptop open on the tray table. The connection held through farmland and small stations. It dropped only in the few areas such as tunnels and hilly areas.

And then there is our village. Five or six years ago, going home for Deepavali meant walking around the home holding the phone, hunting for one bar of signal to send a text or receive a call. Today my calls from that same home.

Meanwhile, on X

This week Elon Musk informed India that it has an internet problem. Starlink, he wrote, would bring “high-speed, affordable Internet connectivity for those who can’t afford current prices or who don’t have a connection at all”.

It is not here yet, he explained, because it is “being blocked by certain oligarchs”, which he called “a crime against the people of India”. A day later he stopped hinting and asked: “Is Ambani the real boss of India?”

The government called the charge “baseless and misconceived”. The duller facts are these. Starlink has held an Indian licence since mid-2025. So have Jio’s satellite arm and Bharti-backed OneWeb. All three are waiting on the same things: security clearance and a decision on spectrum charges.

One more dull fact. In March 2025, Ambani’s Jio signed a deal to sell Starlink in India. So did Airtel. The man Musk accuses of blocking Starlink is on paper to be its shopkeeper.

Then somebody asked Grok, Musk’s own AI on Musk’s own platform, for the disadvantages of allowing Starlink in India. Grok obliged with four: national security, data sovereignty, high costs and market impact. The answer collected 15,000 likes.

When your own chatbot files the dissenting note, it has been a long week.

Three ways to reach the same ocean

Before deciding who is right, it helps to know what is being argued about.

The internet is not a cloud. It is mostly cable. The estimate is that over 95% of international traffic runs through glass fibres lying on the seabed, coming at places like Mumbai and Chennai. Everything after that is a question of the last hop.

• Fibre: glass all the way to your wall.
• Mobile: glass to a tower, then radio for the last stretch to your phone. Your phone is wireless. The network behind it is not.
• Starlink: radio from a dish on your roof to a satellite about 550 km up, then down to a ground station, which plugs into the same glass as everyone else.

The economics follow from the geometry. Cable gets costlier with distance and cheaper with crowds. A satellite does not care where you are. That is why Mumbai gets ₹39, and why a Himalayan outpost will not get fibre.

There is one more difference, and it is the one that matters here. A tower stands on Indian land and belongs to a company that answers to Indian courts. The satellite answers to a control room in America.

Marking Grok’s homework

Grok gave four reasons. They do not all deserve the same marks.

High costs. There is no official Indian price yet. Last December Starlink’s website briefly showed ₹8,600 a month and ₹34,000 for the dish, which the company said was test data. Even at a third of that, my ₹39 is not worried. But expensive is a reason not to buy something. It is not a reason to keep it out. India has never banned anything for being overpriced, or there would be no airport samosas.

Market impact. Grok warns that Starlink could disrupt Jio and Airtel. The same list has just told us it is too expensive for anyone to buy. It cannot be both. The ministry has also reportedly capped Starlink at 20 lakh customers, in a country with over a billion internet connections. That is not a disruption. That is a rounding error with a dish.

Data sovereignty. This one is real, and it has already been dealt with on paper. Rules issued in May 2025 require Indian gateways, bar Indian traffic from foreign ones and demand lawful interception. Starlink says it has built 20 gateway sites here.

National security. This is the one that survives. It is also the one this week’s posts made harder to wave away.

The man and the switch

Fair is fair, so the concessions come first.

Five years is a long time to wait for a file to move, even in a country that has made an art of it. And the post Musk shared claims 11,256 villages still had no 4G as of May. I have not verified the number, but I do not doubt the shape of it. My village got lucky. Not every village has.

Nor is the problem that he is a foreigner with opinions. Foreign companies grumble about Indian regulators all the time. It is practically a licence condition.

And this is not a defence of Ambani. You do not have to admire the man to notice that Jio’s towers stand within reach of an Indian court order.

The problem is narrower. India’s rules say a satellite operator must cut service in any area when the government directs it. It is a sensible rule. It also depends entirely on the person at the far end choosing to obey.

We have some idea how that person chooses. Reuters reported that Musk personally ordered Starlink coverage cut during Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive in Kherson. In December 2024 a Starlink device was recovered in Manipur, while Musk insisted the beams over India were switched off. Whichever account you prefer, the switch was his.

Now add this week. With his security clearance still on the Home Ministry’s desk, the applicant went on his own platform and suggested a named Indian citizen runs the country. He offered no evidence. He has already thrown himself into an American election and into political rows in Britain and Germany.

A businessman waits for the file. A politician campaigns. This week looked a lot like campaigning.

I cannot say he would misuse the switch. I can say we have now seen how he behaves when a government tells him “not yet”.

Back to the Village

My village did not need a satellite. It needed a tower, and one came. Most of India will be connected the same way, at prices that lose to a vada pav.

The places that will not are the border posts, the fishing boats, the forest stations and the districts a cyclone has just flattened. Those places do need satellites. They are also exactly the places where it matters most who holds the switch.

So price was never the real question. ₹39 settled that. The question is whether the edges of the country should depend on a man who, when kept waiting, reaches for the megaphone.

Even his own chatbot had doubts.