By Ashish D. Jain, Executive President & Chief Operating Officer (Telecom) at Polycab India Limited
Two functions, one cable. Have you ever noticed long and metallic cables stretching across the horizon atop tall towers? You might assume they just carry electricity. But thanks to Optical Ground Wire — or OPGW — they’re doing more than that now. They’re quietly ferrying data too, while still grounding the high-voltage power lines they’ve always served. Dual purpose. Clever. Useful. And in many ways, transformative.
Why utilities are paying attention to OPGW
At its core, OPGW is a clever tweak on an existing piece of infrastructure. Instead of a simple ground wire, utilities install a cable that integrates optical fibers along with the traditional metallic conductor. Call it a two-fer. The fiber lives inside a strong protective jacket, handles electrical grounding duties, and simultaneously gives utilities access to high-speed communication channels.
This idea isn’t just theoretical. Globally, the OPGW market was valued at $669 million in 2025 and is projected to climb toward nearly $878 million by 2032, reflecting steady adoption as grids modernize.
That growth isn’t luxury spending — it’s practical infrastructure planning.
Grid reliability isn’t optional anymore
In traditional setups, grid communications depend on third-party networks or separate fiber builds. Promises of performance often bump into real-world glitches: outages, latency, missing links. With OPGW, utilities get direct data links rooted in their own transmission network, bypassing many of those issues.
Imagine this: a lightning strike on a distant line. Faults detected. Notification sent immediately. Protection systems act faster because data moves right along the power corridor itself. It’s not sleight of hand. It’s just better instrumentation and oversight, all built into something the utility already owns.
Cost math that catches leaders’ attention
Here’s the part that gets operational folks more curious than headlines do: you don’t need to build a separate network to support communication. No new poles. No parallel rights-of-way. No long permit delays. The same asset you install to carry electricity now carries data.
When you think about deployment, the cost efficiencies start stacking up fast. Utilities don’t just save on construction. They save on maintenance and long-term operations too. And over the multi-decade life of transmission lines, that’s not small change.
Utilities stepping into telecom roles
OPGW doesn’t just keep the lights on. It opens a new dimension entirely. Once a utility has fiber interwoven into its transmission fabric, unexpected options emerge.
Some utilities lease unused fiber capacity to service providers. Others support government backbone networks. A few take a more active role in managing connectivity services, especially in regions where traditional telecom infrastructure is thin — think remote stretches where fiber trenching is expensive and slow.
This is not utilities abandoning their core purpose. It’s utilities expanding their role, quietly becoming part-owners of resilient, geographically extensive communication backbones. And that sets the stage for smarter grid operations and new revenue streams.
Supporting Digital India — without digging everywhere
India’s digital goals are ambitious: broadband everywhere, rural offices connected, data access improving daily. OPGW helps on both sides of that mission. Transmission lines already sweep across remote landscapes that traditional telecom players find hard to reach. With fiber built into them, these corridors suddenly offer high-capacity data paths without the need for extensive new civil works.
That’s serious leverage of existing infrastructure.
No wonder the Indian power sector — backed by guidelines from the Central Electricity Authority on how to use and share OPGW fiber cores — is actively championing this integration between energy and communication.
Manufacturing quality really matters. More than people usually say out loud. Maybe more than they want to deal with, honestly.
OPGW cables aren’t all built alike. Not even remotely. They sit out there, exposed, taking hits all day long. Wind that just keeps going. Ice that turns up unannounced. Heat baking everything during the day, cold creeping in at night. And then, every now and then, an electrical fault just to shake things up. Through all of that, the optical fibers inside don’t get a break. They’re expected to work. Properly. Year after year. Decade after decade.
This is where real experience starts to show. Manufacturers who genuinely understand both power cables and data cables tend to separate themselves, quietly. Building something that can take the mechanical punishment of high-voltage corridors and still deliver steady optical performance is hard. It’s finicky work. It demands judgment. And it matters, a lot. Cut corners here and nothing seems wrong at first. Time passes. Failures appear sooner than expected. Replacements get costly.
It is also equally important to remember that current grids are not just wires and transformers. They are carrying data. Renewables feeding in and out. Storage systems balancing loads. Demand response kicking in when things get tight. Microgrids doing their own thing at the edges. All of it depends on real-time information flowing smoothly. And that data needs reliable paths, not maybes, not best-effort links, but communication you can trust when the grid is under pressure.
OPGW gives utilities a built-in backbone for that data, without the hassle of managing a parallel communications network. It’s efficient. Functional. And increasingly expected.
In conclusion, OPGW isn’t just upgrading transmission lines—it’s quietly turning the power grid itself into a dependable digital backbone, where electricity and information travel together.