India's RAN market declined 5% year over year to $1.36B in 2025.
We predicted that in our September 2025 report, and we want to be precise about why, because the number is going to be misread. A declining RAN market in India is not a demand problem; it is just what the end of a coverage build looks like.
The underlying activity tells the real story: India's 5G base station count went from 140,623 in March 2023 to 562,971 by June 2026, with 5G now available in 99.9% of districts. That build is finished. What follows is densification, fixed wireless access, and monetization, and all three consume far less capex per unit of subscriber growth than a pan-India coverage sprint does.
The payoff is already visible. Cellular subscribers grew 10% year over year. FWA subscribers surged 65%. TRAI reported 13.45M 5G FWA subscribers at the end of August 2026, with Jio at 9.42M and Airtel at 4.03M, plus another 5.37M on Jio's UBR service. A 5% capex decline alongside 65% FWA growth is not a market in trouble. It is a market that has stopped buying coverage and started selling capacity.
The 4% that isn't 4%
Here is the statistic most likely to be quoted out of context: Open RAN accounted for just 4% of India's total BTS rollouts in 2025.
Set against Japan, where Open vRAN reached 80% of BTS units shipped in 2025, that looks like India is far behind. It isn't, and the reason is the second half of the finding.
Everything deployed in India is O-RAN compliant.
Those two facts together describe a deliberate strategy, not a lagging one. India has not pursued blanket replacement of traditional RAN. Instead, it has pursued targeted adoption while ensuring the entire installed base retains the option to disaggregate later. The 4% is what has been exercised, and the compliance is what has been purchased.
So far, this is the most pragmatic Open RAN posture we have seen from any national market. It avoids the integration cost of a wholesale architectural migration during a build phase, and it preserves every bit of the strategic value when the migration makes economic sense. Which, in India's case, is the 6G cycle.
The indigenous split
The vendor picture in India has bifurcated along a line that is now clearly visible.
Only Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea extended deals with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung in 2024. Jio and BSNL are relying on Indian vendors. BSNL's swadeshi 4G network, with RAN from Tejas Networks, core from C-DOT, and integration by TCS, is the clearest public expression of what the Aatmanirbhar Bharat mandate means in practice.
The RAN vendor leadership board, meanwhile, has not budged. Nokia holds the top position, followed by Ericsson and Samsung. The "other" category is where the interesting movement is: Lekha Wireless Solutions, Radisys, Resonous Technologies, Signaltron Systems, Tejas Networks leading the group, VVDN Technologies, and WiSig Networks.
Anyone who has watched this industry for a few decades should recognize the shape of what is happening. Every telecom equipment power of the last fifty years was built behind a protected domestic market before it ever competed abroad. France had Alcatel and a national PTT that bought from it. Japan had the NTT family. Sweden and Finland had state carriers that incubated Ericsson and Nokia. China's two global vendors were built on domestic procurement at scale.
The protected-domestic-market playbook has a documented success rate, and India is running it with more deliberation than most of its predecessors did. The question is never whether the policy creates national vendors. It does. The question is whether those vendors ever become globally competitive, and that depends almost entirely on whether they are forced to export.
Which brings us to the most important finding in this report.
India is already an Open RAN export hub
Our analysis of India's vendor ecosystem found something that is not reflected in any market share table: global RAN vendors including 1Finity, Ericsson, NEC, and Nokia, along with Indian technology firms such as Tata Elxsi, Tech Mahindra, L&T Technology Services, and HCLTech, perform the bulk of their global O-RAN software engineering, xApp and rApp development, and radio unit manufacturing inside India.
Read that again with the market share numbers in mind. India is 4% Open RAN by domestic deployment and a disproportionate share of global Open RAN by engineering and production.
That gap is the actual strategic position. India is not a late adopter of Open RAN. It is where a large portion of the world's Open RAN gets designed and built. The domestic deployment number is a lagging indicator of a role India already occupies upstream.
It also changes how to read the DoT's Bharat 6G Vision. The stated goal is to move India from technology adopter to intellectual property driver, ensuring home-grown technology plays a central role in global 6G standards. As of June 2026, 136 projects had been approved under the Telecom Technology Development Fund to cover 6G, quantum communication, satellite and NTN, optical systems, indigenous 5G core, and telecom security. In addition, the Bharat 6G Alliance has grown to 90 members.
Standards influence follows engineering concentration. That is true historically and it is true now. If a meaningful share of the world's Open RAN software engineers sit in Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad, the IP ambition is not aspirational, it is arithmetic.
The forecast
Based on the government's 5G expansion and mobile network enhancement plan released in July 2026, we expect India's RAN market to decline slightly against 2025 and stay relatively flat until 6G arrives in 2030.
Applying the same rollout pattern 5G followed, our model puts India's RAN market way above $5B by 2031, a 36% five-year CAGR, with Open RAN accounting for 95% of BTS deployment by that year.
Two observations on that shape.
First, the flat period is not dead time. It is when the indigenous vendor base matures, when the Open RAN-compliant installed base gets exercised, and when India's standards positions are established. Vendors who read 2026 through 2029 as a market to deprioritize will be making a decision about 2031 without realizing it.
Second, the jump from 4% to 95% Open RAN is only plausible because of the compliance decision described earlier. Make no mistake, India is not forecasting a migration, it is forecasting the exercise of an option it already owns.
Japan and India: two routes into the same club
While Japan started the Open RAN nation club, India has now joined it. The two countries got there by opposite methods, and the comparison is instructive.
Japan's route was operator-led. Rakuten built a greenfield network architecture and had no legacy to defend. NTT Docomo pushed disaggregation into a brownfield network and packaged the result for export. Adoption went deep and fast, reaching 80% of BTS shipped. But it happened inside a contracting market, with Japan's RAN spending down 12% in 2025. Japan optimized for deployment and proved the architecture works at national scale.
India's route is state-led. The driver is industrial policy: production-linked incentives, the TTDF, the made-in-India mandate, and the Bharat 6G Vision. Domestic adoption is deliberately gradual while the manufacturing and software base is built out. India optimized for production and is now positioned to supply the architecture Japan proved.
Neither is the better model in the abstract, and that is the point. Japan answered the question of whether Open RAN can carry a national network. India is answering a different one: whether Open RAN can be produced at a cost and scale that makes it the default rather than the alternative. The second question is the one that determines whether the architecture wins globally.
Téral Research's View
One. Do not read India's 5% decline as weakness. Read it as the transition from coverage to monetization, which every market makes and most analysts mistime. The subscriber and FWA numbers are the signal.
Two. The 4% Open RAN share is the least informative number in this report. The 100% O-RAN compliance figure and the 95% 2031 forecast are the ones that matter, and they are connected.
Three. India's export hub role is underpriced by the market. Firms modeling Open RAN supply chains on deployment share are looking at the wrong variable. Engineering and manufacturing concentration is where the leverage sits, and it is already in India.
Four. For vendors, the strategic window is the flat years, not 2031. The relationships, joint ventures, and standards positions that determine who wins India's 6G build are being formed now, while the market looks uninteresting.
India spent the 5G cycle building the largest network of its generation and importing most of the technology to do it. It is spending the gap between cycles making sure that does not happen twice.
The full report, "India Wireless Infrastructure," including vendor shares, segment detail, and five-year forecasts, is available to Téral Research clients. For access or a briefing, contact us at contact@teralresearch.com.