Three years into India’s 5G roll-out, the industry has achieved impressive scale, with half a million sites activated and coverage extending across urban and semi-urban geographies. Yet, the more consequential questions are only now coming into focus. How can telcos monetise beyond the consumer market, whether the enterprise and private 5G opportunity can be unlocked at scale, and what it will take to bring meaningful 5G connectivity to rural and remote India? During a panel discussion on telcos’ perspective and plans at tele.net’s conference on 5G & Beyond, held in New Delhi, Pankaj Chaudhary, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Reliance Jio; Dharmender Khajuria, Head – Network Partnerships, Bharti Airtel; and Ashwinder Sethi, Partner, Analysys Mason, discussed the highlights of India’s 5G roll-out, strategies for expanding rural outreach and the current state of the telco-to-techco transition. Edited excerpts…
Pankaj Chaudhary
When Reliance Jio launched 5G services in 2022, it made a deliberate choice that set it apart from every major operator in the world at the time – making a direct commitment to standalone architecture from day one. While most global operators, including Airtel in India, began with non-standalone deployments and planned a later migration, Jio’s approach was to build the network for what 5G would ultimately need to deliver, not for what was fastest to market.
The practical benefits of standalone are clearest in latency performance, upload and download consistency, and the architecture’s readiness for enterprise-grade applications such as network slicing and private 5G. Jio’s investment in standalone architecture positions it to offer these capabilities as enterprise demand develops.
The traffic story already validates the demand side of the equation. Despite the smartphone penetration gap and the limited internet of things (IoT) ecosystem, approx. 70 per cent of Jio’s data traffic now runs on 5G. The 5G handset installed base is generating significantly more data per device than the 4G base, driven by higher average throughput and the willingness of 5G subscribers to consume more bandwidth-intensive content. This shift has important implications for network economics as 5G radio is more spectrally efficient, and the migration of traffic to 5G has provided meaningful capacity relief on the 4G network, reducing congestion and improving the experience for users on both generations simultaneously.
The generational shift in data consumption patterns reinforces how significant the 5G uptake has been. When the industry moved from 3G to 4G, users who had been consuming 2-3 GB per month on 3G shifted to consuming 2 GB per day on 4G. That change in usage drove an entire wave of application and platform development. The move from 4G to 5G has not yet produced an equivalent application-layer shift, but the traffic data already shows that 5G subscribers consume disproportionately more data than 4G subscribers. The infrastructure is ahead of the use case development, and this is simply a timing question. The IoT ecosystem and the enterprise application layer will eventually catch up, and 5G will be the platform on which they run. For now, the cases that are working, IoT applications where 4G is not sufficient, premium subscriber management and enterprise backhaul are being actively pursued. 5G is also being deployed at border areas, extending coverage to geographies that would otherwise have been underserved.
Rural connectivity is being addressed primarily through 5G fixed wireless access (FWA). Jio’s position is that no village in India should be beyond the reach of FWA, and the company is deploying it as the default solution for broadband in areas where the fibre economics do not work. For premium subscribers requiring high-speed mobile data, Jio is also prioritising end-to-end performance management as a service layer on top of raw connectivity. Fibre-to-the-home, meanwhile, is concentrated in dense urban areas where the subscriber density supports the capital outlay. The two approaches are complementary and are being deployed simultaneously rather than sequentially.
On fibre, Jio has fiberised approximately 65 per cent of its sites, a level that required sustained effort and remains one of the highest in the Indian industry. The barriers to reaching 100 per cent are largely policy-driven rather than technical. Right of way (RoW) remains the most significant obstacle, with local bodies continuing to levy charges that the Telecommunications Act, 2023, was designed to eliminate. Jio’s view is that fibre should be treated as a national asset, comparable to road or power infrastructure, and that the same principle of not double-charging operators for infrastructure that benefits the public should apply. The GatiShakti portal, which was intended to streamline RoW approvals, has not yet been implemented consistently at the ground level. Approval rejections continue to be a daily operational challenge. Beyond RoW, Jio estimates that approximately 30 per cent of each operator’s deployed fibre network is damaged or disrupted at any given time, representing a substantial loss of capital asset and capacity.
On network slicing and cloud-native functions, Jio’s position is clear-eyed. The technology development is real and the direction is right, but full commercial implementation will take time. Slicing, edge deployment and cloud-native core are all being worked on actively, but they are not yet deployed at scale. These are not speculative futures but confirmed trajectories. The 400G backhaul mesh already in place provides the capacity foundation on which edge nodes and cloud integration can be progressively built out. The network is being constructed to accommodate what comes next, not retrofitted for it.
Jio has also moved aggressively on artificial intelligence (AI) integration across both the consumer and network layers. On the consumer side, AI is embedded in fraud detection and spam management systems. On the network side, alarm generation, field engineer despatch and cell optimisation are now automated processes running on AI models rather than through human-supervised network operations centres.
The backhaul infrastructure has also been upgraded significantly as the original 4G-era 100G backhaul capacity has been replaced with a 400G mesh across Jio’s national network, integrated with third-party data centres and hyperscaler nodes. This architecture also supports edge computing requirements emerging from both enterprise and consumer AI applications. Network slicing, cloud-native functions and edge deployment are all in development, with full-scale implementation expected to continue over the next several years as both the technology and the enterprise demand side mature together.
Dharmender Khajuria
India’s 5G journey, which began in October 2022, has been among the fastest network roll-outs the world has seen. In just under three years, the industry has activated approximately half a million 5G sites, bringing coverage to over 65-75 per cent of the population. All urban and semi-urban clusters are now covered, and roll-out continues steadily into deeper geographies.
Airtel’s approach to 5G, using non-standalone architecture, contrasts with Jio’s decision to deploy standalone from the outset. Both are defensible choices, and the practical difference in user experience between the two, from a speed and download perspective, has been limited for most consumer scenarios. The more meaningful distinction lies in latency and in the capabilities that standalone unlocks for enterprise applications. 5G’s true differentiation over 4G has not yet translated into a meaningfully different consumer experience at the application layer. A video plays at the same frame rate regardless of whether the underlying network is 4G or 5G. The ecosystem of applications, developers and system integrators that transformed the user experience during the 3G to 4G transition, giving rise to entirely new categories of services such as ride-hailing, e-commerce and food delivery, has not yet materialised at the same scale for 5G. That ecosystem maturation typically takes five to seven years. It is under way, not absent.
In the meantime, 5G’s clearest monetisation success in India has been FWA. The total cost of ownership for FTTH makes it economically unviable for dispersed rural deployments. FWA fills this gap effectively, bringing high-speed broadband to locations where fibre cannot reach. The strategy is therefore complementary rather than competitive. Fibre for dense urban areas where the business case supports it, and FWA for areas where it does not. The goal, however, remains clear. Fibre is the ultimate backhaul for any serious network, whether 5G today or 6G in the future. Currently, only 35-41 per cent of towers in India are fiberised. Achieving the 70-80 per cent fiberisation level needed for a genuinely high-quality 5G experience remains a critical and unfinished objective.
Another aspect of 5G’s value that is often understated is the capacity relief it has provided on the 4G network. The concurrency that 5G enables – the ability to serve far more simultaneous users at speed – has given operators significant breathing room. If 5G had not arrived when it did, the Indian industry would have faced a very different and considerably more difficult network capacity situation, given the pace of data consumption growth. In that sense, 5G has already delivered substantial value, even if it is largely invisible to the end user.
On fibre sharing, Airtel is already working cooperatively with other operators including Vodafone Idea and Tata to pool and share fibre assets where it makes sense commercially. While this addresses part of the gap, the more structural solution requires treating fibre as a national asset governed by a dedicated fibre grid body, analogous to how the power sector is managed. Without that institutional framework, the industry will continue to rely on bilateral arrangements that fall short of the scale required.
Meanwhile, the central obstacle, at present, is RoW. The Telecommunications Act was passed in 2023, and the rules came into force from January 2025. Over 32 of India’s 36 states and union territories have notified compliance. But notification at the state level does not automatically translate into implementation at the local level. Urban local bodies, municipalities and panchayats continue to treat RoW as a revenue-generating mechanism rather than a facilitative framework. Cities such as Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Nagpur remain particularly challenging environments for fibre deployment, because local standing committees retain independent authority that even state governments cannot override. The National Broadband Mission and the Ministry of Communications have been actively engaged in finding a resolution, but ground-level execution continues to lag policy intent.
On AI, the integration into Airtel’s network is already operational rather than aspirational. Self-healing networks and predictive maintenance tools have been running for over two years.
On the consumer side, Airtel has embedded spam call detection using AI, and has partnered with Perplexity to offer AI-access products to its subscribers. The broader direction is toward using AI as a layer of intelligence across the network stack, including fraud detection, cybersecurity and operational automation. Airtel’s view is that AI will be the defining technological shift for telcos in the coming decade, complementing and accelerating the network-layer transitions from 4G to 5G to 6G.
From an enterprise and sector-specific perspective, the most promising 5G use cases for a country with India’s profile are likely to emerge in the agriculture, healthcare and education sectors. These are not use cases that a telecom service provider can deliver alone. They require a stack of hyperscalers, system integrators and application developers working with the connectivity layer that telcos provide. Airtel positions itself as the platform on which that broader ecosystem operates.
Pilots in port automation, steel manufacturing and mining are ongoing, though enterprise adoption at scale remains at an early stage. The building blocks are in place, and the return on investment clarity that enterprises need before committing to private 5G is still forming.
Ashwinder Sethi
India’s 5G infrastructure build-out has been impressive in speed and scale. But the harder question is whether the investment is translating into commercial returns, particularly on the enterprise side where 5G’s true technical differentiation lies.
Globally, the US and China are the most advanced markets for 5G private networks. From studying both, 8-10 use cases have reached meaningful commercial traction, including in sectors such as manufacturing, logistics and mining. India is measurably behind on this curve and the gap has two distinct causes.
The first is regulatory. The spectrum framework for private 5G in India has not been clear or commercially practical enough to support wide deployment. A business-to-business-focused operator such as Tata Communications, which operates exclusively in the enterprise segment, should not have to acquire a full consumer-plus-enterprise spectrum license to serve its customers. Until that policy clarity arrives, operators targeting the enterprise market are working with one hand tied.
The second is on the demand side. Indian enterprises have not been proactive in exploring or adopting 5G private networks, despite the availability of credible global use cases that demonstrate return on investment. Mining is a clear example. The productivity and safety benefits of private 5G in that sector are well documented globally, yet Indian mining companies have not moved to adopt it at scale.
Both constraints reinforce each other. When policy is unclear, operators cannot build investable propositions. When operators cannot build clear propositions, enterprises cannot see a compelling case. Breaking this cycle requires movement on both sides simultaneously, that is, regulatory clarity on private 5G spectrum, and more proactive enterprise engagement from the industry.
The risk of inaction is real. Hyperscalers and system integrators are not standing still, and if Indian telcos remain primarily connectivity providers while others take the platform and integration layer, the enterprise revenue opportunity will accrue elsewhere.
