By Kunal Bajaj, Co-Founder & CEO at CloudExtel
India’s digital growth story has moved well past the aspirational stage. With over 900 million internet users and some of the highest per-capita data consumption in the world, the country’s connectivity demands are outpacing what legacy infrastructure was ever designed to handle. The question today is not whether India needs more network capacity. It is whether the way that capacity gets built is fit for what lies ahead.
The answer, increasingly, points toward shared and neutral-host fibre infrastructure. Not as a workaround or a cost-cutting measure, but as the most logical and sustainable foundation for a connected economy at India’s scale.
Why Sharing Makes Structural Sense
India’s telecom sector has long operated on a model of parallel construction. Competing operators lay their own fibre along the same corridors, each building infrastructure that serves one commercial interest. The model made a certain kind of sense when differentiation lived at the physical layer. That is no longer the case.
The economics of fibre are straightforward and unforgiving. Trenching, cabling and last-mile maintenance are expensive, slow and disruptive. Repeating that effort across overlapping geographies is a poor use of capital that no single operator can justify indefinitely. Shared infrastructure changes the equation. When a neutral party owns and manages the underlying fibre and multiple operators access it on equal terms, deployment costs are distributed, timelines compress and the quality of the network improves because the owner’s entire business depends on its performance rather than on winning customers over a competitor.
Markets in Europe and Southeast Asia have moved meaningfully in this direction. India, with its combination of dense urban corridors and vast underserved geographies, has more to gain from this model than almost any other market.
5G Cannot Run on Wireless Alone
Public conversations around 5G usually focus on spectrum, devices, and speed. What people don’t talk about much is the fibre that makes 5G work. Every 5G base station, every small cell in a city and every private wireless network for businesses needs fibre to carry data at speeds and low latency. No fibre, no 5G.
India’s 5G launch has been quick in terms of spectrum and commercial deployments. However the fibre infrastructure needed to support 5G is not keeping pace. Many mobile towers in India still rely on microwave links instead of fibre. As data usage grows and businesses need reliable connections this gap becomes a bigger problem. To fix this we need to build fibre not for today but also for the future growth of 5G over the next five to seven years.
The Infrastructure Gap Is Real and Growing
Most of India’s current fibre network was built more than ten years ago for voice and basic internet services. It wasn’t built for the data volumes, reliability and low latency needed for modern business applications, cloud services or big data flows. The gap between what this infrastructure can do and what the market expects is growing every year.
The right-of-way challenge makes this problem worse. Deploying new fibre in India means navigating permissions across municipal bodies, state governments, and local authorities, each operating under different rules and timelines. This coordination is one of the most persistent bottlenecks in network expansion, and one that a neutral infrastructure provider, operating with long-term asset ownership in mind, is often better equipped to manage than an operator balancing network build alongside customer acquisition and service delivery.
How the Operator Landscape Is Shifting
India’s major telecom operators are not standing still. The response to infrastructure complexity has generally been a mix of selective network upgrades, infrastructure sharing arrangements, and in some cases, divestiture of passive assets to free up capital for service-layer investment. This is a rational response to a market where competitive differentiation is increasingly about what you offer over the network rather than what you own beneath it.
As connectivity at the physical layer becomes more commoditised, the commercial logic for operators owning every metre of fibre weakens. What grows in its place is the case for partnering with neutral providers who can deliver reliable infrastructure without the complications of competing commercial interests. That shift is creating real demand for well-run neutral fibre ecosystems across India’s key metro markets.
Infrastructure built today must be designed for long-term scalability and sustainability. As network demands continue to rise, telecom ecosystems will require infrastructure models that are resilient, upgrade-ready, and operationally efficient over time. Neutral-host frameworks naturally support this approach because they are built around long-term asset performance rather than short-term competitive expansion.
The Larger Picture
All the aspirations of India to digitally transform their businesses, build intelligent infrastructures, manufacture intelligently, and harness AI for their services have one common prerequisite, and that is connectivity that should be dependable, scalable, and extendable well beyond its eight most prominent cities. Getting fibre there, with quality, requires a model that is economically rational for all parties.
Shared, neutral fibre infrastructure is not a niche proposition. It is becoming the practical answer to a structural challenge that no single operator, acting alone, can fully solve. The industry knows this. The question now is the speed and conviction with which it chooses to act.
In light of a digitally driven future that is unfolding in the country at a rapid pace, the significance of the telecom infrastructure discussion has gained increasing prominence. It is through the celebration of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day that it is possible to gain some perspective on how fast-changing data requirements, digital service needs, and evolving connectivity demands have altered the country’s telecom infrastructure dynamics beyond simply adding more networks.