Reliance Broke Telecom, Now Watches Space Market

India's first private rocket reached orbit on its debut flight when Reliance Industries' Skyroot Aerospace launched Vikram-S in November 2022, a 34-meter vehicle carrying satellites to low Earth orbit.

The achievement was real and the framing was spectacular. What got buried was the precedent. This exact story already happened in India twenty-five years ago, just in a different sector.

In 1999, the Indian government broke its state monopoly on telecommunications and private entrants flooded in. Vodafone arrived in 2007, Airtel scaled, Jio came later with predatory pricing and wrecked the market entirely.

The sequence was not competition leading to innovation. It was competition leading to consolidation, then regulatory gatekeeping, then one company owning the infrastructure the others depended on. The telecom liberalization produced choice for six years, then produced a monopoly that looks different because it wears a private label. Watch for the same mechanism in space. The Indian Space Research Organisation controls launch slots and satellite frequency allocation. Skyroot cannot reach orbit without regulatory permission and cannot build a commercial satellite business without spectrum the government controls.

Right now this looks like opportunity and three private companies emerged in Indian space in the past four years. But spectrum and launch capacity are not like spectrum in telecom where signal degrades and you need more towers. In space there is absolute scarcity. You cannot create more orbital slots. Reliance was a telecom competitor once, then became the infrastructure owner. Jio broke other carriers not through better technology but by buying the government's favor and the frequency to exclude them.

In space, Reliance is launching rockets. Watch whether Reliance becomes the launch infrastructure owner within ten years. Watch whether smaller competitors suddenly find launch slots unavailable or frequencies allocated to Reliance's satellites.

The victory is not the rocket reaching orbit. The victory is whether the market stays open after Reliance proves the model works. History suggests it won't. The question for your own practice is simple. What scarcity do you depend on that someone else controls? That is where power consolidates next.