How a Bangalore startup, a Japanese tech giant, a 125-year-old conglomerate, and a forgotten government lab are together writing the next chapter of India's connectivity story
Most CIOs and CTOs in North America know India as the country that provides software engineers, runs call centres, and builds IT services firms. They know Tata because of Jaguar Land Rover. They know NEC because it once made laptops. They do not yet know that in February 2026, a story unfolded in Bengaluru that deserves serious attention from anyone thinking about enterprise infrastructure, 5G supply chains, and the shifting geography of technology manufacturing.
On February 26, 2026, Tejas Networks — a company most of your peers have never heard of — announced a contract with NEC Corporation of Japan to manufacture and supply 5G Massive MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) radios for global telecom operators. The Tejas Networks stock jumped 16% on the day. A few days later, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, India's Minister for Communications unveiled Tejas's newest product on the world's most-watched telecom stage.
To understand why this matters, you need to go back forty years. To a rundown government hotel in Delhi. To a young man from Odisha who gave up an American passport to fix India's telephone problem.
Act One: The Problem That Needed Solving (1947–1984)
If you grew up in India before the 1990s, you remember trunk calls. To speak to someone in another city, you did not simply dial. You called the operator. You booked the call. You waited — sometimes hours. The operator connected you, and you spoke on a crackling line with the clock running. International calls, called ISD (International Subscriber Dialing), were ceremonial events. Not routine communication.
In 1981, India had approximately 2 million telephones for a population of roughly 800 million people. The equipment running those exchanges had been imported from foreign manufacturers — old electromechanical systems that were expensive to maintain and impossible to scale. The country that had produced mathematicians, scientists and engineers of global stature could not make its own telephone switch.
The reason was not capability. It was policy. The Licence Raj — the system of permits, controls and government monopolies that governed the Indian economy until 1991 — made it nearly impossible to build an indigenous technology industry. Telecom was owned and operated by the government. Equipment was procured from foreign vendors. Engineers who wanted to build things left for the United States.
India was importing the pipes and gears of its own communications network, dependent on foreign firms for equipment that carried every government message, every business transaction, every personal call.
Act Two: Sam Pitroda and the Digital Switch (1984–1992)
Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda — known to the world as Sam Pitroda — was born in Titlagarh in Odisha in 1942 and left for America in 1964. He worked in the Chicago technology industry, built companies, filed patents, and became a wealthy man. He invented the electronic diary in 1975, years before the personal digital assistant was a category. He had become a naturalised American citizen.
On a trip back to India in 1981, he could not call his family in Chicago. The experience of navigating India's telephone system from the inside — with its booked trunk calls, its operator-mediated connections, its interminable waits — crystallised what he already knew professionally: India's telecom infrastructure was a generation behind, and the gap was growing.
In 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi invited him to return. He came back, renounced his American citizenship, retook Indian citizenship, and agreed to help build something that had never been done in India before: an indigenous digital telephone exchange.
What C-DoT Was
The Centre for Development of Telematics — C-DoT — was registered as a non-profit society in 1984, funded by the government but granted complete autonomy. Parliament allocated the equivalent of $36 million over 36 months to design a digital switching system suited to India's specific conditions. Pitroda took a salary of one rupee per year.
The conditions C-DoT had to design for were unlike anything the major Western vendors had considered. India's network needed to work in extreme heat without constant air conditioning. It needed to function through dust, intermittent power supply, and rural geography. The Ericsson and Alcatel equipment of the era was designed for European climates and Western urban density.
C-DoT's engineers — deliberately young, many of whom had been about to emigrate — solved the heat problem by using lower-power microprocessors and spreading the circuitry to allow heat dissipation without air conditioning. They solved the dust problem by sealing the cabinet. They delivered a working digital switching system in three years, largely on schedule.
The engineers were conspicuously young and never seemed to sleep. Most had been ready to leave India when this opportunity came along. Now they threw themselves into India's future.— Sam Pitroda
What C-DoT Built
C-DoT did not build a single product. It built a family of digital exchanges: small rural exchanges for village networks, medium exchanges for district towns, and large urban exchanges for metropolitan centres. It then transferred this technology to over 680 manufacturers in the private sector, who produced equipment worth billions of rupees and created tens of thousands of jobs in electronics manufacturing.
The STD/PCO booth — that bright yellow sign on every Indian street corner offering Subscriber Trunk Dialing and Public Call Office services — was born from this moment. Before STD, to call another city you needed a phone at home, which required a years-long wait and substantial money. The STD booth gave every tea shop owner, every disabled person, every small trader the ability to make direct calls to any city and any country, for the cost of a few rupees. It created approximately 2 million new livelihoods. It connected India to itself.
Countries including Bhutan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ghana, Tanzania, Nepal and Nigeria adopted the C-DoT rural exchange design because it worked under conditions no Western vendor had bothered to engineer for.
What Pitroda and C-DoT demonstrated in the 1980s was a principle that would not be fully acted upon again for another thirty years: India could design world-class telecommunications technology indigenously, at a fraction of Western cost, specifically suited to conditions that Western vendors had not considered. The lesson was learned, then partially forgotten as liberalisation opened India to foreign competition in the 1990s. It took Huawei's global fall from grace to make that lesson urgent again.
The Companies in This Story: A Field Guide
The Tejas-NEC announcement involves a cast of organisations that are unfamiliar to most Western technology leaders. Understanding who they are is essential to grasping what is happening.
Founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata in Bombay, Tata is India's largest and most diversified business conglomerate — built through nation-building, not financial engineering. Tata Steel (1907). Tata Power (1910). The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (1911). Tata Airlines, which became Air India (1932). Today the group comprises 30 companies across 10 sectors with a combined market capitalisation exceeding $328 billion. Total revenues for FY25 exceeded $180 billion. The group employs over one million people across more than 100 countries. The holding company, Tata Sons, has 66% of its equity held by philanthropic trusts — the long-term, nation-building orientation that distinguishes Tata from Western conglomerates answerable to quarterly earnings. Its 2021 acquisition of Tejas Networks placed the most strategically important Indian telecom equipment maker inside the group that had everything else: manufacturing scale, government relationships, a trusted brand, and access to capital.
Asia's largest IT company and one of the five largest IT services firms in the world. Provides software development, infrastructure management, cloud services, data analytics and systems integration to banks, insurers, retailers, airlines and governments globally. Revenue for FY25 exceeded $30 billion. In the Tejas-BSNL story, TCS is the systems integrator — the general contractor who led the consortium, managed the deployment of 100,000 4G/5G cell sites, and built the network operations software. Think of TCS as the general contractor and Tejas as the manufacturer supplying the physical radio equipment.
India's government-owned telecom research and development organisation, founded by Sam Pitroda in 1984. Think of it as India's equivalent of Bell Labs, but state-funded and focused on telecom standards and core network software. It has survived four decades of India's telecom policy cycles and remains the institution that designs the core network software for India's sovereign telecom infrastructure. In the BSNL 5G project, C-DoT contributes the Evolved Packet Core — the software brain of the mobile network that handles authentication, session management and data routing. No foreign company touches it.
India's government-owned telecommunications operator, formed in 2000 from the Department of Telecommunications. BSNL's commercial significance has diminished as Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea dominate urban India. Its strategic significance is permanent: it serves remote rural areas, border zones, military installations and areas of national importance that private operators do not reach. In June 2025, BSNL launched 4G services — nearly nine years after private operators had introduced them. That delay was deliberate: the Indian government waited until an entirely indigenous technology stack was ready. The BSNL 4G/5G network runs on Indian hardware from Tejas, Indian software from C-DoT, and Indian systems integration from TCS. No Ericsson. No Nokia. No Huawei.
Founded in Tokyo in 1899 as Japan's first joint venture with a foreign company, established in partnership with Western Electric of the United States. Over 125 years, NEC built Japan's first commercial computer (1953), laid subsea cables across the Pacific, pioneered mobile telephony and satellite communications, and became one of Japan's five largest defence contractors. Today NEC provides IT services, cloud computing, artificial intelligence platforms, Internet of Things solutions, and carrier network equipment to governments and telecoms across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Annual revenue approximately $27 billion. Its facial recognition technology consistently ranks first in accuracy testing by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Founded in Bengaluru in 2000 by Sanjay Nayak, Arnob Roy and Kumar Sivarajan — an academic from the Indian Institute of Science. Initial funding came from Gururaj Deshpande, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sycamore Networks in the United States. The mission from day one was to build globally competitive, carrier-grade telecom equipment in India — not for India alone, but for the world. The name Tejas is Sanskrit for radiance or brilliance — chosen deliberately: the founders believed India could build products that would shine in global markets, not merely domestic ones. Acquired by Tata Sons in 2021. Acquired semiconductor design firm Saankhya Labs in 2022, giving it chip-level intellectual property rare among telecom equipment makers of any nationality. Over 525 global patents. Products deployed in 75+ countries.
What Tejas Actually Builds
Tejas designs and manufactures equipment across four categories that together constitute a complete telecom network.
Wireless — 4G and 5G Radio Access Network (RAN): The equipment that sits inside cell towers and transmits signals to mobile devices. This includes Massive MIMO radios — the 5G-era antenna systems that use dozens or hundreds of antenna elements simultaneously to serve multiple users and dramatically increase network capacity. Tejas makes 32TR (32 transmit/receive) and 64TR variants, the current state of the art in 5G radio density. All products comply with both 3GPP (the global mobile standards body) and O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network) standards — meaning they interoperate with any standards-compliant network, not just proprietary systems.
Optical Transport — DWDM and OTN: Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing allows multiple data streams to travel simultaneously over a single optical fibre by using different wavelengths of light. This is the technology that carries internet traffic between cities and countries. Tejas optical equipment is used by Airtel, Tata Communications and other operators for backbone networks.
Broadband Access — GPON and XGS-PON: Gigabit Passive Optical Network technology delivers fibre broadband to homes and businesses. Tejas GPON equipment is the backbone of BharatNet — the world's largest greenfield rural broadband rollout, delivering high-speed internet to over 200 million people. Tejas equipment fulfils 70% of BharatNet's requirements.
Packet Switching — IP/MPLS and Carrier Ethernet: The routing and switching equipment that directs internet traffic within operator networks. Tejas products use a programmable, software-defined hardware architecture — meaning the same physical equipment can be upgraded through software as standards evolve. Operators are not forced to replace hardware every time a new standard arrives.
The BSNL Deployment: One of the Largest in Telecom History
To understand Tejas's current position in India, one number is essential: 100,000. That is the number of cell sites for which Tejas supplied 4G and 5G radio equipment to BSNL under a ₹7,492 crore contract — approximately $900 million — awarded in August 2023 and completed in 2025.
The project was a consortium led by TCS, with C-DoT supplying the network core software, Tejas supplying the baseband and radio equipment, and ITI Limited providing additional components. The entire technology stack was required to be indigenous — no foreign company in the critical path of India's national telecom infrastructure.
This is one of the largest single-vendor Radio Access Network deployments in the world, ever delivered in record time.— Anand Athreya, CEO and Managing Director, Tejas Networks
The project was completed in 18 months from contract award. Deploying equivalent Western vendor equipment across 100,000 sites typically requires 3–4 years. The indigenous 4G stack was demonstrated at the G20 Summit. Eighteen nations expressed interest in adopting it. India, a country that was importing equipment for its telephone exchanges in the 1980s, was now exporting the blueprint for a complete national mobile network.
The NEC Contract: Supply Chain Politics Made Concrete
NEC is a credible, large-scale global telecom vendor selling to Japanese operators (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, KDDI), Southeast Asian operators, and increasingly European and American ones. It needs a diversified supply chain for its 5G radio hardware. After the restrictions placed on Huawei and ZTE equipment in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia and other markets, the search for trusted non-Chinese suppliers of 5G equipment has become urgent across the global telecom industry.
Tejas brings to this partnership: O-RAN compliant hardware, proven at scale across 100,000 sites, carrier-grade reliability, competitive manufacturing cost, and no geopolitical exposure. NEC brings global distribution, established operator relationships, and the credibility of a 125-year-old Japanese technology brand.
This is not a charitable arrangement. NEC's Corporate Senior Vice President framed the rationale explicitly: supply chain diversification to reduce risk and build a resilient, flexible globalised ecosystem for its customers. In plain terms: NEC needs a second source for radio manufacturing that is not located in China or dependent on Chinese components. Tejas is that source.
This contract builds on a larger framework. In October 2025, the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding worth $500 million focused on co-developing 6G technologies and promoting Indian 5G exports. The February 2026 contract is the first concrete commercial deliverable from that partnership.
Mobile World Congress 2026: India on the Main Stage
Mobile World Congress — held annually in Barcelona each March — is the world's largest telecom and mobile industry gathering. Every major operator, vendor, government and analyst attends. Being on that stage with a product launch signals arrival, not aspiration.
At MWC 2026, India's Minister for Communications, Jyotiraditya Scindia, led India's delegation and inaugurated the Bharat Pavilion — a dedicated showcase of India's telecom manufacturing capabilities. He visited the Tejas booth for the launch of the T31600-D3 Hyper-scalable Data Centre Interconnect Platform.
DCI — Data Centre Interconnect — is the equipment that links large data centres together at very high speeds. The infrastructure layer that carries AI training workloads, cloud computing traffic and hyperscale operations between facilities. Tejas entering this space puts it on the radar of hyperscalers and enterprise network operators, not just telcos — the same transition that Ciena and Infinera made from pure optical telecom vendors to data centre fabric suppliers, a move that significantly expanded their addressable market.
The minister also delivered a keynote on breaking the cost barrier for inclusive connectivity — tying India's national experience of universal broadband at Indian cost points to an export proposition for developing-world governments building their own sovereign telecom infrastructure.
The Innovation Thread: What Tejas Is Actually Building
Software-Defined Hardware Architecture
The defining technical characteristic of Tejas products is programmability. The same physical radio or switch can support multiple generations of standards through software upgrade. For a CIO evaluating enterprise private 5G infrastructure, this means the equipment deployed today is not obsolete when 5G-Advanced standards arrive in two years. You update software, not hardware. That is a concrete capital expenditure argument.
O-RAN Compliance
O-RAN — Open Radio Access Network — is the industry initiative to disaggregate the historically proprietary radio network stack. Traditional 5G equipment from Ericsson or Nokia locks operators into a single vendor's hardware, software and management systems. O-RAN separates these layers, allowing operators to mix hardware from one vendor with software from another. Tejas has been O-RAN compliant from the outset — making its equipment compatible with open architecture deployments that enterprise private 5G buyers and European operators are increasingly adopting to reduce vendor lock-in.
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
The 2022 acquisition of Saankhya Labs gave Tejas the ability to design the chips inside its own products. Most telecom equipment vendors buy silicon from Qualcomm, Intel or Broadcom and build around it. Tejas can now design custom silicon for specific applications — particularly satellite IoT and broadcast — giving it performance and cost advantages that pure systems assemblers cannot replicate. By 2025, the company had developed over 350 semiconductor intellectual property blocks through ₹557 crore in annual R&D investment.
Hyper-Scalable Data Centre Interconnect
The T31600-D3 announced at MWC 2026 represents the newest frontier. As artificial intelligence training and inference workloads grow, the data centre interconnect layer becomes a bottleneck. Equipment that can handle hyperscale volumes at low latency and low power is the next generation of infrastructure problem. Tejas entering this space signals it is not satisfied with telecom operator markets alone.
Who Benefits, and How
BharatNet has connected over 200 million people through Tejas GPON equipment. Children in villages that had no internet before 2020 attend online classes. Health workers in remote areas access telemedicine platforms. The STD booth that Sam Pitroda gave India in the 1980s was a physical object in every market town. BharatNet is its 21st-century equivalent — fibre to every gram panchayat, built on Indian equipment.
Airtel, Vodafone Idea and BSNL all use Tejas equipment. Indian operators gain a domestic full-stack supplier — wireless, optical, broadband and routing — who understands Indian network conditions, prices in rupees, and carries no geopolitical risk.
Any operator in any country that has restricted Huawei or ZTE equipment needs an alternative 5G radio supply chain. Tejas, through NEC, now offers O-RAN compliant 5G Massive MIMO radios manufactured in India, with Japanese distribution and brand assurance, at cost points European vendors cannot match. The addressable market for this value proposition is enormous.
For CIOs and CTOs evaluating private 5G deployments, data centre interconnect infrastructure, or telecom vendor risk: Tejas is now a name to know. Its O-RAN compliance, software-defined architecture, Tata Group backing, and NEC partnership provide the credibility and distribution that a Bengaluru startup in 2000 could not have provided on its own.
Eighteen nations expressed interest in India's indigenous 4G stack after the G20 demonstration. For a developing country government that wants to build a national mobile network without Chinese equipment and without European vendor prices, the Indian model — Tejas hardware, C-DoT software, TCS integration — offers something genuinely new.
The Competitive Landscape
Tejas competes against Ericsson (Swedish), Nokia (Finnish), Huawei and ZTE (Chinese), and Ciena and ADVA (American and German respectively) — the established names in telecom infrastructure. In India, domestic competitors include HFCL, Sterlite Technologies and ITI Limited.
The competitive dynamics have shifted. Huawei and ZTE are restricted in a growing number of markets. Ericsson and Nokia are expensive, proprietary and European. No American vendor has a complete radio access network product suite at competitive price points. The space for a trusted, O-RAN compliant, competitively priced, non-Chinese vendor backed by a credible conglomerate and a major Japanese partner is real.
The stock market's reaction to the NEC deal — a 26% jump over two trading sessions — reflects both genuine excitement and the recognition that FY25's record revenue was heavily dependent on the BSNL contract. The nine-month period ending December 2025 showed an 89% revenue decline year-on-year as the BSNL project wound down. The NEC partnership is the answer to the obvious question: what comes after BSNL? International markets, through NEC's distribution network, is the answer being given.
The Longer Arc
Forty years separate Sam Pitroda walking into a rundown government hotel in Delhi with a mandate to build India's first digital telephone exchange and Tejas Networks walking onto the Mobile World Congress stage in Barcelona to launch a hyper-scalable data centre interconnect platform.
The thread connecting those two moments is not government policy or industrial strategy alone. It is a belief, maintained across generations of Indian engineers, that the country that gave the world the concept of zero should not be a permanent importer of the technology that carries its conversations.
C-DoT proved that belief in the 1980s — and then the proof was partly forgotten as liberalisation opened India to foreign vendors. Tejas Networks re-proves it for the 5G and artificial intelligence era. The BSNL deployment — 100,000 sites in 18 months, one of the largest single-vendor Radio Access Network projects in telecom history — is the demonstration of what India can build when the policy will, the engineering talent, and the industrial capacity align.
The NEC partnership signals that this is no longer only a domestic story. Japan is buying Indian 5G radio hardware for deployment in global networks. Eighteen countries watched the G20 demonstration and asked how to replicate the model. India's Minister for Communications is on the stage at Mobile World Congress, not in the audience.
What Tejas represents is not merely a company. It is the second coming of an idea that Sam Pitroda first demonstrated in 1984: that India does not need to import its communications infrastructure. It can build it, export it, and set the terms.
For enterprise technology leaders: watch this space. The geography of technology manufacturing is shifting. The supply chains that served the last two decades of enterprise infrastructure procurement are being restructured. India is not a beneficiary of that restructuring. It is one of its architects.
