India targets 1 billion 5G users by 2030 and claims 7,700 6G patents

What happened

The India Mobile Congress is the country's largest yearly telecom event. Its tenth edition opened in New Delhi on 8 October 2026 under the theme Scale Without Boundaries. In his opening speech, Scindia set a target of 1 billion 5G users by 2030. That would roughly double the present figure of about 550 million. He described India's 5G uptake as the fastest in the world, which is the minister's own claim.

Scindia also spoke about the next generation of mobile technology. He said the Bharat 6G Alliance, a group of 90 institutions working with foreign partners, has established 7,700 patents, and 4,400 of them are international. He told the audience that India had been behind the world in 4G and now wants to lead in 6G. Patent counts show research activity. They do not show that working 6G products exist yet.

The minister made one more announcement. The council of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations agency for telecom, has accepted India's offer to host its Plenipotentiary Conference in 2030. This is the ITU's highest meeting, where member countries set policy and elect leaders. India also hosted the ITU's standards assembly in 2024, which the ITU called the largest such assembly ever held outside Geneva.

Scindia compared today's numbers with those from the first India Mobile Congress in 2017. Broadband customers have grown from about 60 million to more than 1.1 billion, and there are 1.35 billion mobile customers. He said the price of 1 gigabyte of data fell from Rs 268 in 2014 to about Rs 8 today. Mobile phone manufacturing in India, he said, grew from about $2 to $3 billion in 2014 to about $63 billion now.

The engineering behind it

Reaching 1 billion users is mostly a network-building task. As general knowledge, 5G needs many more radio sites than 4G, especially in the higher frequency bands, because those signals travel shorter distances and pass poorly through walls. Each site needs antennas, radio units, power, and a fast link back to the core network. Engineers plan where to place sites, which frequencies to use, and how much capacity each area needs.

Behind the radio sites sits the fixed network. Scindia described BharatNet as a $15 billion government programme. It brings middle-mile fibre to nearly 260,000 village councils and offers on-demand links to about 380,000 more villages, with a goal of 100 megabits per second to every home. In general, middle-mile fibre is the link between a local area and the national backbone. Without it, a new mobile tower cannot carry much data.

6G research is at a different stage. In general terms, it studies higher frequencies, new antenna designs, and networks that use artificial intelligence to manage traffic. Much of the work happens in standards groups, where companies and universities propose technical solutions and patent them. When a country's patents are written into a global standard, other manufacturers pay to use them. This is why governments count patents, even though most of the technology is still years from phones.

Manufacturing is the other half of the story. Business Today reports that India's production-linked incentive scheme, which pays makers according to how much they produce at home, has strengthened local phone manufacturing. Scindia said India became one of the top four producers of technology equipment within 22 months. In his ten-year view, the next step is to sell Indian telecom technology abroad, not only to attract foreign companies to India. Building phones and network equipment needs electronics design, testing and quality control skills.

What it means in Nepal

Nepal is at an earlier point. The Kathmandu Post reported in June 2026 that Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan are the only South Asian countries without commercial 5G. The Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) said it was ready to auction 5G spectrum. Nepal Telecom said it would launch 5G in major cities once it receives frequencies, and Ncell applied for 5G trials for the third time in April 2026.

On 1 October 2026, Ratopati reported that the NTA said operators may already run 5G on their existing spectrum, under a policy called technology neutrality. The authority said it would assign the 800 megahertz band to existing operators first, then the 2600 and 3500 megahertz bands. Operators told the regulator that 5G investment is costly and its returns are uncertain. The Kathmandu Post also reported that the share of 5G-capable phones in Nepal has grown from about 5 percent to more than 20 percent.

For students, the useful point is the skill set. A 5G rollout, in any country, needs engineers who understand radio propagation, antenna placement, spectrum planning and network operations. Fibre backhaul and IP routing matter just as much. India's large build-out shows the type of work involved, and the same skills will be needed when Nepal's operators receive their frequencies. Engineers who can test a link, read a coverage map and troubleshoot a radio site are useful in every one of these projects.