India’s telecom moment

For decades, India has been a consumer of telecom technology rather than a creator of it. Over 90% of the country’s telecom infrastructure equipment is imported, with a handful of foreign giants — Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung, and ZTE — collectively holding over 95% of the Standard Essential Patents that define how modern networks work. Every rupee spent on imported proprietary gear is a royalty payment to a foreign balance sheet. Every closed-stack deployment deepens a dependency that threatens not just our wallets but our digital sovereignty.

This was, until recently, the simple reality. Building competitive telecom equipment required decades of investment and thousands of specialised engineers. The entry barrier has been prohibitively high for any newcomer, and only a few Indian companies have attempted to breach it. Two forces have now changed the calculus fundamentally — the rise of open-source software stacks that disaggregate the telecom network into interoperable software components running on commonly available hardware; and the emergence of AI as a network management and optimisation engine. Together, these forces have created a structural opening for India that did not exist five years ago.

The transformation of enterprise data-centre networking over the past decade offers a precise template for what is now possible in telecom. In 2010, data-centre networking was a closed oligopoly — Cisco, Juniper, and a few others bundled hardware and software and charged accordingly. The rise of open networking initiatives like “OpenFlow” and “SONiC”, combined with commodity merchant-silicon hardware, shattered that model. Cloud hyperscalers drove costs down 60-80%, and hundreds of new software-defined networking companies emerged virtually from scratch.

The global telecom industry stands at exactly this inflection point today. An operator-driven initiative called the O-RAN Alliance opened the internal architecture of mobile networks, creating the “OpenFlow moment” for wireless. Open-source telecom initiatives have blossomed globally. India’s IOS-MCN programme — a multi-institutional collaborative initiative involving IISc, IIT Delhi, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, and a growing ecosystem of startups and micro, small, and medium enterprises—has already delivered a deployment-grade, standards-compliant open-source platform, validated in live campus deployments at IIT Delhi and IISc Bangalore using Indian-manufactured radio hardware. The platform exists. The question is whether India will seize the opportunity it creates.

India’s framework for captive non-public networks (CNPNs) — private wireless deployments for enterprises and industrial facilities — represents one of the most significant market-creation opportunities in the history of Indian technology. Manufacturing plants, ports, mines, railways, hospitals, and smart cities all need dedicated, high-performance wireless connectivity. Global analysts estimate that CNPNs could reach hundreds of billions of dollars globally within a decade; without an indigenous platform, that demand will be met by yet another wave of imports.

The private network context is uniquely suited to India’s open-source approach for a reason that deserves more attention — private networks do not need to be fully compliant with onerous international standards in every internal detail. Unlike public networks, which must interoperate with every device and every carrier on the planet, a CNPN deployed in a factory or port operates in a controlled environment with known devices and known use cases. This gives AI-driven implementations room to substitute for complexity. Instead of manually engineering thousands of network features — a process requiring hundreds of human-years of specialised effort — AI can learn, optimise, and adapt to deliver the same outcomes through intelligence rather than exhaustive protocol machinery.

This is not a theoretical possibility. Just as mobile phones exploded in utility by enabling third-party apps on the phone, the 

O-RAN architecture has enabled apps within the network. AI-driven apps can transform networks by delivering energy optimisation, interference management, and radio resource allocation, replacing rule-based configuration with predictive, intent-driven control. They can improve network performance by improved load balancing and handover management, replacing static rules with reinforcement learning.

AI-driven handover systems can reduce failure rates by 30-50% — a capability critical for robotic process control and autonomous vehicles in industrial settings. Large language models trained on the international standards specification can further compress implementation from years to months, allowing an open-source platform to match the feature velocity of proprietary vendors with far fewer engineers. The Indian Open Source for Mobile Communication Networks (IOS-MCN) road map, for example, embeds AI throughout the network. The result is networks that are not just cheaper to build, but also easier to operate, faster to deploy, and better suited to the specific demands of each vertical industry. That is a genuinely differentiated value proposition — one that Indian product companies can own.

India should treat the CNPN market not merely as a business opportunity but as a strategic incubator. The policy imperative is clear — aggressively promote CNPN using open-source and the emerging Indian product ecosystem, create procurement incentives that favour domestically built open-source solutions, and fund the next phase of the programme with the urgency it deserves. The prize is a vibrant ecosystem of Indian product companies — startups, system integrators, domain specialists — each building differentiated CNPN solutions on a shared, freely available foundation. Like how India’s UPI catalysed a generation of fintech innovation, this approach can catalyse a generation of connectivity product companies serving not just Indian verticals but also the global market. Success in the CNPN market builds the engineering talent, the IP portfolio, the customer references, and the manufacturing ecosystem that India will need to compete in the broader public network market.

That broader market is the ultimate strategic goal. India’s public telecommunications infrastructure — the backbone of a 1.4 billion-strong digital economy — cannot indefinitely depend on foreign proprietary systems. An open-source 5G/6G stack such as IOS-MCN, developed by Indian institutions, auditable by Indian agencies, and maintained by Indian engineers, is not merely a cost-saving measure. It is a prerequisite for genuine digital sovereignty. The technology exists. The ecosystem is forming. The market window is opening. India’s telecom moment is now.

This article is to mark World Telecommunication and Information Society Day which falls on May 17

Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.