Fiber remains the cornerstone of India's telecom backhaul infrastructure, even as emerging technologies such as microwave, E-band, and wireless consumer premises equipment (CPE) begin to play a more significant role. Executives from the country’s leading telecom carriers reaffirmed this at the recently concluded ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025.
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Complementary Role of Microwave, E-Band
"More fiber will ensure coverage of newer areas on fiber. Besides fiber, there are technologies like microwave and E-band, which have more scalability and capability, but also have limitations. So these technologies have to complement fiber," Deepak Sanghi, Executive Vice President and Head of IP and Transport Network at Bharti Airtel, was quoted as saying in the report.
Sanghi also stressed the importance of cost optimisation in the adoption of new technologies, in a cost-sesitive market like India. "Any technology is good to implement unless and until we work on the cost aspect. There have to be significant changes from this perspective so that we stay continuously on the path to lower cost per bit," he added, as per the report.
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Echoing the sentiment, Girish Dave, Head of 5G, 6G and AI Solution Management at Reliance Jio, referred to fiber as the "gold standard" for physical connectivity, particularly in urban last-mile access. "But in the dense urban areas where it is not feasible to put a fiber, we use outdoor CPEs (consumer premises equipment) to connect to the radio base station. Using this arrangement, we are comfortably achieving up to 1 Gbps speeds with C-band spectrum. So this is the level of innovation happening in the industry," he reportedly said.
Jophy Varghese, APAC Head of System Integration and India Country Manager at Verizon Business, reportedly pointed to key challenges in backhaul network upgrades, including costs, interoperability, vendor lock-in, compliance, and security. He noted that telecom firms are investing heavily to ensure a seamless customer experience during this transition. "Hyperscalers and the overall ecosystems are coming together to ensure that we are gearing up for the future. We would see more partnerships being forged in this space as we move forward," he reportedly said.
AI and ML Enhance Network Reliability
Pashupati Singh, Director of Account Management at Ciena, highlighted the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in maintaining high network uptime and reducing latency. "With AI and ML of late, globally we have been able to develop algorithms that help us understand and proactively predict events in real-time to prevent outages and service disruptions," Singh was quoted as saying in the report. "With the help of these, we will help everyone to reduce the cost per bit and improve uptime."
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Sandeep Donde, Founder and CEO of Microscan Infocomm, emphasised the significance of high-quality fiber and robust operations and maintenance (O&M) systems. “Improvement of the fiber quality is the most important factor for any fiber backbone, or you will have a jittery experience."
"Telecom industry may consider consolidating its fiber infrastructure footprint to attain synergies, resiliency, and quality of services,” Donde suggested, as per the report.
"Fiber plays a major role in backhaul to an ordinary person, such as for connecting a tower to the core network or a customer premises to the internet. The deeper the fiber, the less the load on backhaul. Backhaul needs to be very strong, especially for companies like us specialising in content delivery," Anil Malhotra, chief revenue officer (affiliate sales) and head (public and regulatory affairs), Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, was quoted as saying in the report.
The session was moderated by Akanksha Saxena, Director at KPMG India, and reflected the industry's consensus on fiber's enduring role in shaping India's digital infrastructure, even as it embraces new technologies to meet evolving connectivity demands.
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