Atul Jain: Director, Technology and Standards, Broadband India Forum
Atul Jain serves as director of Technology and Standards at the Broadband India Forum (BIF), working on issues that affect both telecom service providers and consumers. He focuses on a policy advocacy that is “technologically agnostic, all-inclusive and enables more choices to consumers at affordable rates.”
He highlights the persistent digital divide as a key challenge. The gap between urban and rural internet users has hovered at around 65 per cent in recent years, underscoring the need for a mix of access solutions, including wireline broadband, PM-WANI public Wi-Fi and satcom, to complement cellular broadband. Looking ahead, he expects the telecommunications sector’s focus to be “inside buildings”, as 80 per cent of data usage happens there, with satcom, wireline, cellular and Wi-Fi deployed in combination to deliver high quality of service indoors.
With over three decades in telecom and IT, Jain has worked across government and private sectors in business development and solution design. Throughout his career, he has held senior and mid-level techno-managerial roles, driving innovation and strategic growth. His experience spans optical fibre cable planning and network construction, data centre management and IT staffing. He has also contributed to critical communications in India through collaborations with Airbus Land and Defence, Funkwerk and Cyrus Devices.
At BIF, he prepares and provides responses to consultation papers issued by the Department of Telecommunications, the Ministry of Electronics and IT, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. He serves as convenor for BIF’s broadband infrastructure, fibre-to-the-x and in-building solutions, cybersecurity, and data centre committees, and is involved in policy advocacy for subsea infrastructure.
Jain describes his strengths as deep, hands-on experience across data centres, multiprotocol label switching, fibre infrastructure and critical communications. His management style is to “take all along in the most democratic manner”, fostering inclusion and shared ownership.
He is a management graduate from MDI Gurugram and an undergraduate of Meerut University. In his spare time, he reads widely on business and the telecom sector, and is an avid reader of books on Vedic astrology. Family roots in education and business remain strong influences: his father served as a principal, his wife is a homemaker, his son is a business consultant after graduating from IIT Kharagpur, and his daughter is in senior secondary school.
