How can India compete differently in the emerging 6G economy?
India has made significant and encouraging progress in 6G research, standardization and intellectual property. Its ambition to contribute around 10 percent of global 6G patents is both worthy and necessary. But patents, research publications and standards contributions are not, by themselves, measures of technology leadership. The real test will be whether India can convert this growing capability into deployable 6G products and solutions, successful commercial deployments and globally competitive businesses.
India should therefore complement its technology ambitions with equally clear commercial outcomes. An aspirational objective could be for indigenous 6G products and solutions to capture around 20 percent of relevant domestic markets and around 5 percent of selected global markets by 2033. These should not be blanket targets for the entire 6G equipment market. They should instead serve as strategic outcome metrics, around which R&D, product development, market access, standards, investment and export strategies are aligned.
The central question is therefore not simply how much 6G technology India can develop, but how much of the value created by 6G Indian companies it can capture by designing, manufacturing, and deploying products that win domestic and global market share. Achieving this will require India to compete differently from established global telecom vendors and identify areas or innovative business models where it can create genuine differentiation rather than remain in a perpetual cycle of catch-up.
For more than three decades, a small group of established vendors has shaped the global mobile telecom infrastructure industry by building formidable advantages through sustained R&D, large-scale deployments, extensive intellectual property, mature supply chains, and global customer relationships. These advantages are reinforced with every technology cycle.
As India moves from 5G toward 6G, a more fundamental question deserves attention: can Indian telecom product companies realistically compete head-to-head with established global OEMs by building similar products, matching features, and competing primarily on price?
The challenge is structural, not merely technological. Established players can amortize very large development costs over global volumes, while their installed bases, standards influence, product maturity, and customer confidence create barriers a new entrant cannot quickly reproduce. Even a technically capable Indian product may struggle if it offers no compelling differentiation and must compete against an incumbent on essentially the same parameters. If India continues to follow the same classical competitive model, it risks being trapped in a permanent cycle of business failure.
The strategic question, therefore, is not whether India can build telecom products. It is whether India should compete using the same business model as the incumbents. I believe the answer is no. India needs a different pathway: one that combines indigenous 5G/6G network capabilities, sensor-integrated machine-type connected devices, an application platform, and distributed AI compute into end-to-end captive infrastructure for sensing, connectivity, and compute, with adequate user programmability to run advanced physical AI applications across multiple domains. These advanced solutions, packed with efficient system integration and operational services for captive deployment, are becoming the new rule in global competition.
From equipment competition to solution competition
The conventional telecom business has largely been built around proprietary, tightly integrated “black box” network systems. For an emerging Indian vendor, competing directly in this segment means facing global incumbents on price, scale, feature maturity, and installed base at once. This is a difficult equation.
A more promising route is to use open, disaggregated, “white-box” telecom network infrastructure as a platform for higher-value innovation. The objective is not to sell a white-box base station/network as an end in itself. It is to be combined with AI-edge devices and AI control application platforms to become end-to-end communication and compute infrastructure for building domain-specific productivity enhancement solutions for strategic benefit. Service offerings with highly skilled system integration and operations support shift from a “single-X” business model that sells network equipment alone to a “multiple-X” business model that bundles devices, AI applications, and operational services into a single value-added offering. Shifting from a ‘single-X’ to a ‘multiple-X’ business model changes the focus from product to solution, from providing to traditional customers to serving end-user enterprise customers, building a culture suited to enterprise needs, and fostering deeper collaboration with academic research to create differentiating solutions.
This changes the basis of competition. Instead of asking whether Indian equipment can be sold at the same price as a global black-box system, the question shifts to whether indigenous solutions can create substantially greater value for the customer through productivity enhancement, automation, energy efficiency, worker safety, resilience and lifecycle services. The network becomes an enabling platform rather than the complete product.
White -box infrastructure should therefore be viewed as an enabling pathway, not the strategy itself. Its value lies in greater programmability and flexibility to fine-tune captive connectivity and compute for specific operational objectives. This can bring deep-tech startups, academia, industry and system integrators together to experiment continuously and identify areas where India can move from participation to global product leadership.
6G may open a different competitive window
This strategy becomes particularly relevant as 5G-Advanced and 6G move beyond enhanced mobile broadband toward deterministic network connectivity, sensing, positioning, massive machine connectivity and real-time control. These capabilities can make the network part of the control loop for physical systems, robots, autonomous machines, industrial equipment and other cyber-physical systems.
For such applications, connectivity is no longer merely a transport layer. Reliability, latency, synchronization, security and local control become part of the value proposition. In selected latency and mission-critical applications, captive/private networks can provide the controlled environment needed to integrate communications, edge intelligence and physical processes.
Potential domains include smart manufacturing, robotic control, defence and tactical networks, power systems, precision agriculture, disaster management and other industrial applications. The strategic opportunity for India is therefore to develop complete, exportable solutions around these use cases rather than waiting for 6G to become another cycle of mass-market network equipment competition.
Adoption of the ‘multiple-X’ business model will also address one of India’s persistent weaknesses: the distance between technology development and the eventual customer. operators, enterprise users and strategic-sector organization should participate much earlier in the development cycle. Their involvement can define real requirements, enable field trials, create a pathway from prototype to deployment and help the whole ecosystem learn from early technological failures and establish a path to greater success subsequently.
Policy must create the conditions for a new competitive model
Government support remains essential, but its role should shift from funding individual technologies to building an ecosystem where products can survive commercially. India has already established significant 6G ambitions, including the stated goal of contributing at least 10 percent of global 6G patents. Recent government initiatives also emphasize standardization, innovation, incubation, and commercialization.
The next phase should therefore focus on five outcomes: predictable access to reference markets; mission-scale product development; open and interoperable architectures; stronger research-to-product translation; and export-oriented deployment. A focused policy framework should translate these five outcomes into an executable program. Public procurement and strategic-sector adoption can provide early reference markets. Long-term competitiveness will ultimately depend on customers recognizing the superior value delivered by these new technology product-solutions.
Every major technology transition creates opportunities for new leaders. India’s 6G opportunity will not be determined by its ability to replicate the scale or business model of today’s incumbents. It will depend on whether India can convert research into products, products into deployable solutions, and deployable solutions into globally competitive businesses.
The ambition and strategy should therefore go beyond following in the footsteps of the world’s successful players. India should aim to compete differently and, in selected areas, shape the next generation of exportable Physical AI solutions built around differentiated 5G+/6G, white-box platforms, AI-Native Network elements, edge intelligence, and distributed AI compute.
I would like to thank Prof Krishna Sirohi, IIT Delhi, for the stimulating conversations around his 5G and beyond work on White-Box field deployable infrastructure and research translation for Industry and Defense. This helped shaped the ideas here.
Sanjeev Kakkar is a senior telecom professional and technology strategist with extensive CXO-level leadership experience. The views expressed are personal.
