When Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio stormed into India’s telecom market a decade ago, it rewrote the rules of competition, forced consolidation and permanently altered the economics of the industry. Elon Musk's Starlink is being seen as a future threat to American telecom giants such as AT&T and Verizon.
To be sure, unlike Reliance Jio, Starlink is not poised to disrupt the market through rock-bottom prices. In fact, Starlink often costs more than conventional broadband offerings in the United States. Yet analysts increasingly believe that in future Musk could trigger a major disruption by changing how connectivity is delivered, who controls it and where telecom profits are generated, radically altering the American telecom industry like Jio did in India.
