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Starlink wants to enter India, but there’s already a giant sitting in the market. Reliance Jio has 538 million broadband subscribers. That’s almost 152 million more than Airtel.
And the gap is bigger than you might think.
TRAI’s August 2026 data puts Airtel at 386.3 million subscribers, Vodafone Idea at 130.8 million and BSNL at 27.8 million. ACT, which is better known for its home broadband connections, has 2.48 million.
But before you assume everyone here is paying for Wi-Fi at home, there’s something worth knowing. These numbers include mobile internet users too. India had around 1.1 billion broadband subscriptions in August, but only 48.63 million were wired connections. Most Indians are getting online through their phones.
This is where Jio has had a massive advantage. When it entered the telecom market in 2016, it made mobile data ridiculously cheap. Other telecom companies had to respond, data usage shot up and getting online became a lot more affordable. Jio now has a customer base that most companies can only dream of.
But the next part of the story is home internet. Jio and Airtel are pushing fibre broadband and AirFiber, which uses wireless technology to connect homes without needing a cable running all the way to the building.
Unlike Jio and Airtel, Starlink uses satellites to provide internet. This could be useful in remote areas where laying cables or building mobile infrastructure isn't practical. The catch is that its equipment and subscriptions could be expensive for the average Indian household, and it still needs the required government clearances to launch commercially.
So no, Starlink probably isn't going to take millions of Jio customers away overnight. Its bigger opportunity could be places where getting a decent internet connection is still a struggle.
Jio has already won a huge part of India's mobile internet market. The next battle is about who can connect the people and places that existing networks haven't fully reached yet.
