India crossed the 400 million 5G subscriber mark in January 2026, with 530,945 5G base transceiver stations deployed as of March 31, 2026. The numbers appear impressive on paper. However, behind these headline figures is a structural challenge that operators, policymakers and infrastructure players are all grappling with. Only 44-46 per cent of Indian base stations are fiberised. For a technology as dependent on its transport layer as on its radio layer, such a wide gap has significant implications.
The conversation around 5G in India has, for too long, centred on spectrum bands, city coverage counts and subscriber additions. What has received far less attention is a simpler truth– no amount of airwaves or antennase can compensate for an inadequate ground-level fibre network. As India moves towards 5G Advanced and eventually 6G, this reality is becoming impossible to ignore.
The xHaul equation India cannot ignore
In 4G, backhaul, which is the connection between a tower and the core network, was the primary transport concern. In 5G, the demand has expanded into a three-layer challenge. Fronthaul connects the radio unit to the distributed unit. Midhaul connects the distributed unit to the centralised unit. Backhaul connects the centralised unit to the core. Together, this is referred to as xHaul and each segment places distinct demands on the underlying fibre infrastructure.
The shift to centralised radio access network (C-RAN) and Open RAN architectures, which operators are progressively adopting for cost efficiency and flexibility, makes fronthaul the most demanding link of all. Fronthaul requires latency of under 100 microseconds and bandwidth of 25 Gbps or more per 5G cell site and only fibre can reliably deliver this at scale. Microwave, which still carries the bulk of India’s non-fiberised backhaul traffic, simply cannot scale to these demands at the densification levels that 5G requires.
A CRISIL Ratings analyst summed it up: “To unlock 5G’s full potential, India must focus on deploying more mid- and high-band spectrum, upgrading backhaul infrastructure and further densifying network roll-out.” In other words, the transport bottleneck is not theoretical; it is a reality.
Operator realities
Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are the engines of India’s 5G story, holding roughly 75 per cent of wireless subscribers between them. Their approaches to fibre and network architecture, however, reveal starkly different philosophies and varying levels of preparedness for the next phase of connectivity.
Jio took the road less travelled by deploying a 5G stand-alone (SA) architecture from the outset. This strategy required a significantly more fibre-dense transport network but one that pays clear dividends. By mid-2025, Jio’s SA 5G was live across more than 7,800 towns, delivering sub-10 millisecond latency and consistent 1-plus Gbps speeds in metros. The SA architecture, which removes the 4G anchor entirely, is what makes network slicing commercially viable, something that non-stand-alone (NSA) deployments cannot offer at scale. Jio’s slicing capability, underpinned by its SA core and fibre-fed transport, is already enabling early industrial and enterprise 5G use cases.
In May 2025, Jio went a step further by beginning the deployment of self-manufactured small cells through its joint venture with Sanmina Corp, mounting compact 4G and 5G nodes on street furniture such as lampposts and billboards. At scale, this small cell push is likely to be one of the biggest drivers of urban fibre densification that the country has seen.
Airtel, in contrast, has taken a different route. Operating on NSA architecture that anchors on existing 4G infrastructure, the operator has prioritised rapid coverage expansion over deep architectural transformation. In parallel, Airtel has signalled its intention to transition to SA. Its acquisition of 400 MHz of spectrum in the 26 GHz mmWave band from Adani Data Networks indicates a clear intent to lead high-capacity urban deployments, which will require dense fibre fronthaul to function.
Vodafone Idea Limited’s (Vi) entry into the 5G space in March 2025 came with a financial caveat. Financially constrained, Vi remains absent from the fixed broadband and fixed wireless access (FWA) segments entirely and its 5G roll-out depends heavily on leveraging existing 4G infrastructure across its top 17 circles. For Vi, the fibre equation is secondary to financial survival. Meanwhile, BSNL has yet to commercially launch 5G, despite completing its indigenously developed 4G stack. It is a notable milestone, but one that still leaves the telco on the sidelines of the 5G transport conversation.
Where the ground reality bites
India’s fiberisation story is one of aspiration and friction in equal measure. More than 4.2 million route km (rkm) of optical fibre cable (OFC) has been laid across the country, with Tamil Nadu and Kerala leading at over 80,000 rkm each. But the volume of fibre laid tells only part of the story.
With only around 46 per cent of towers fiberised, India remains well behind peers such as China at over 80 per cent, Thailand at 90 per cent and Malaysia at 80 per cent. In the 5G context, this gap is felt most acutely in dense urban areas where, ironically, the economics of fibre deployment are among the most challenging. Right-of-way (RoW) challenges, road-cutting approvals and municipal bureaucracy together make urban fibre roll-out slow and expensive.
The regulatory landscape has been improving. The RoW Rules, 2024, which came into effect on January 1, 2025, replaced the fragmented state-by-state permission structure with a centralised single-window framework under the Gati Shakti Sanchar portal. However, on-the-ground execution remains uneven. States such as Karnataka had not formally implemented the 2024 RoW Rules as recently as mid-2025, forcing infrastructure providers to navigate outdated legacy frameworks.
This challenge has been compounded by a significant capex slowdown. New 5G site additions fell sharply to 8,000-9,000 per quarter in the second half of FY2025, compared to approximately 111,000 additions per quarter in the second quarter of FY2024, according to ICICI Securities data. With India’s telecom sector carrying total debt of around Rs 6.6 trillion as of March 2025, operators are struggling to balance continued network expansion with financial sustainability. Fibre densification, with its longer payback horizon, is often the first area to face cuts when capital budgets tighten.
The technology that reveals the gap
One of the more striking dynamics in India’s 5G story is how FWA has become both a workaround for the fibre deficit and, paradoxically, a proof of it. By March 2026, India had 12.32 million 5G FWA subscribers, with Jio’s JioAirFiber dominating the segment at roughly four times Airtel’s Xstream AirFiber base.
The success of FWA is partly because of fibre’s absence. In areas where wireline broadband infrastructure remains patchy, owing to RoW bottlenecks, last-mile costs and the decline of legacy cable networks, FWA has emerged as the more readily deployable alternative. This has helped expand broadband access across underserved urban and semi-urban areas. However, FWA’s relationship with fibre is not one of replacement; it is one of dependence. Each FWA tower serving thousands of homes is itself a backhaul-hungry node and the higher the subscriber load, the more fibre it needs behind it. As Jio targets 1 million new FWA connections per month, the pressure on its transport network compounds accordingly.
FWA can bypass the last-mile fibre problem for end consumers, but it cannot address the mid-mile and backhaul challenges for operators.
5G Advanced
The global 5G standards trajectory is moving firmly towards what the 3rd Generation Partnership Project terms 5G Advanced. For India’s operators, 5G Advanced is already a planning imperative, with fibre at the centre of its requirements. AI-native radio networks are being introduced, with machine learning algorithms operating across the RAN. These networks require low-latency, high-bandwidth transport to communicate AI inference results in near-real time between radio units and centralised compute infrastructure. Meanwhile, enhanced network slicing is enabling operators to create guaranteed-performance virtual networks for verticals such as healthcare, manufacturing and logistics. However, these capabilities are viable only where the underlying transport infrastructure can meet the latency and capacity requirements of each slice.
The ultra-reliable low-latency communication enhancements in 5G Advanced further increase fronthaul requirements. Submillisecond latencies for applications such as remote industrial control or connected vehicles demand densely deployed fibre. As India moves towards mmWave-based urban 5G, the required small cell density, potentially one cell every few hundred metres, transforms the fibre fronthaul network from a capital investment into a basic prerequisite. India’s Bharat 6G Mission is already advancing indigenous research, but the transition from today’s NSA-dominant, under-fiberised 5G networks to a 5G Advanced network will depend on bridging the fibre gap.
The way ahead
Several large-scale initiatives are converging to accelerate India’s fiberisation trajectory. The National Highways Authority of India plans to lay approximately 10,000 km of OFC along national highways under a public-private partnership model, with pilot corridors already designated on the Delhi-Mumbai and Hyderabad-Bengaluru routes. Meanwhile, Phase III of the amended BharatNet programme includes a specific mandate to integrate 5G backhaul into its rural fibre footprint, even if execution timelines remain stretched.
The draft National Telecom Policy 2025 has also set a target of 90 per cent 5G population coverage by 2030, alongside full 4G coverage. These targets are only achievable with a substantial increase in fiberisation. As per the Cellular Operators Association of India, India needs to invest approximately Rs 2.2 trillion to fiberise 70 per cent of its towers, while ratings agencies project telecom capex of around Rs 3 trillion over the next four to five years. That capital will need to flow as much towards transport as towards radio if the 5G promise is to translate into real-world performance.
As per PwC, fiberising 70 per cent of mobile towers by 2027 is a realistic target, given that telecom carriers and OFC companies are deploying fibre extensively to meet bandwidth demand across consumer, enterprise and data centre segments. Policy, regulatory and commercial incentives are now better aligned. However, the gap between where India’s 5G stands today and where 5G Advanced will require it to be is increasing faster than fibre roll-out is progressing. Bridging this gap steadily, systematically and at scale will be a key challenge in India’s next phase of digital infrastructure development.
