Daybreak - How are companies with no spectrum winning India's 5G game?

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

India's telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure.A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators, sovereign wealth funds, and the Supreme Court.And it points to a much larger shift in who really owns the network.Tune in. 🚨The Ken's Zero Shot podcast is hosting a live event! This is a speculative yet realistic discussion built around one premise: what happens when AI agents take off in India? How will they rewire existing habits, business models and profit pools? Since nobody knows for sure, we won't pretend to have all the answers. Instead we are going to break the narrative. Click here for details. 

Think about the last time that your phone had no signal and how quickly that feeling tipped from inconvenience to something closer to panic. Now, imagine that feeling inside a brand new airport where you've just landed. One that cost thousands of crores of rupees to build. That is exactly what happened at Navi Mumbai International Airport at the end of last year. Passengers landed or waited for flights and found themselves in a complete network dead. zone. They couldn't even make calls or use the internet. There was no signal, basically. But the airport had the infrastructure for 5G. Dozens of small signal nodes embedded into ceilings, corridors, basements, far more than older airports. So the hardware was there. The problem was a standoff

between the companies who built the infrastructure and the companies who were supposed to use it. Adani Airport Holdings, which operates the airport, had put in place the shared indoor network and was asking Gio Airtel and Vodafone Idea to pay $92,000,000 every month to access it. The telcos refused. But here is what makes this more than just a pricing dispute. You see, 5G signals travel on higher frequencies and they carry enormous amounts of data. but they are physically weak, which means that a wall can stop them, a ceiling can absorb them. So covering a large building with 5G takes dozens of antennas,

and that infrastructure alone costs tens of crores of rupees to install, which is why doing it separately for every telecom operator is redundant and expensive. So a new kind of company stepped in. They own no spectrum, they hold no telecom license, they just build the pipes and charge everyone to use them. And this is turning India's entire telecom power structure upside down. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Nick Daal Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle.

Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 24th of March. The company stepping into the space are called neutral hosts. The name tells you exactly what they do. They build the shared indoor wireless infrastructure and stay neutral, letting any telecom operator plug in. The two biggest names in India right now are Ibis networks and Cloud Exitel.

Ibus manages connectivity, infrastructure across 25 airports plus apartments, hospitals, hotels, malls and IT parks. In the four years leading up to the financial year 2025, its operating revenue nearly tripled to over 100 crore rupees. It posted its first profit of 14 crores in three years, and it reportedly is targeting 2,000 crore rupees in revenue within a couple of years. Cloud Exitel raised 200 crore rupees in debt in late 2025 to scale its network. It clocked over 160 crores in revenue in the financial year,

The money following these companies is serious. In early 2024, NIIIF, which is India's quasi-sovereign wealth fund, invested $200 million in Ibus. The International Finance Corporation added another 280 crores shortly after. Now, that NIAF investment matters beyond the money. You see, it is effectively the Indian government's own investment arm. So while one arm of the government, which is the telecom department, was writing letters, asking Adani Airport Holdings to bring down its access charges and protect telcos, another arm was funding the very ecosystem that the telcos were fighting against. The government is playing both referee and coach at the same time. And it gets even more layered.

The upcoming J-WR airport near Noida has appointed Aces India, which is the local arm of a Saudi Arabian company as its digital infrastructure provider. That airport had to also ask telcos to pay around $67 lakh every month. The telecom department stepped in there as well, asking authorities to grant telco's right-of-the-way access. Meanwhile, the hardware companies building this infrastructure are thriving. Frog Innovations, which supplies the distributed antenna systems or DAAS, which is the technical backbone of these networks, grew its revenue to $219.19 crore rupees in the financial year 2025. This was a 40% jump from the year before. Nearly half of its dash revenue now comes from neutral hosts and system integrators. A few years ago, telcos were its dominant customers.

The economics itself has shifted. supplying the AS for a single airport now costs 25 to 30 crore rupees up from the earlier 15 crore rupees. That cost is typically borne by the landlord or the neutral host who then recovers it by charging telcos for access, which is exactly what triggered the Navi Mumbai airport standoff in the first place. The neutral hosts are not doing anything technically illegal. They operate on what one lawyer called regulatory. tolerance because the spectrum, the subscribers and the service obligations still sit with the licensed telcos.

There is no law that clearly prohibits venues from charging for access. There is also no law that clearly permits third-party companies to operate active indoor networks. The rules have just not caught up. India's draft telecom network rules do propose a new category of third-party infrastructure providers, one that would let neutral hosts formerly own and operate active indoor infrastructure. And that would change everything. Regulatory tolerance would become regulatory right. So this is a fight that we're talking about with no clear winner. More on this in the next segment.

So Delco's have a legitimate concern here. Connectivity has always been their product, their entire business model, which is spectrum. licenses, subscriber relationships, service quality is built on the idea that they control how signals reach their customers. An indoor network, they neither own nor fully control is a direct threat to that. Their industry body told the government as much. Only licensed telecom companies with spectrum rights should be allowed to install and operate active in-building networks. But the neutral hosts have a legitimate point too.

In dense, complex buildings, shared infrastructure is simply more efficient. Building the same system three times over, wastes money and space. And a carrier neutral setup gives every telco equal access. No single operator gets a structural advantage from having installed its own kit first. And this friction runs even within the telcos themselves. For example, at the Navi Mumbai Airport, BSNL has already been on imported on the neutral host network. Airtel participated in the coverage trials, but Gio and Vodafone ID are refused.

Different companies have different calculations. A smaller operator with a 3.5% market share and limited 5G capacity has every incentive to take any deal that expands its footprint, even if the larger players are holding out. The same dynamic played out on the Mumbai Metro in 2023. High access charges led some operators to walk away from sections of the network, leaving commuters without signal in certain stretches. And in early 2025, a company called Crest Digital sued the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation for awarding a 5G in-building contract to Indus Towers without a proper bidding process.

The case went to the Supreme Court which upheld the metro operator's decision. The fight over who bills and who pays is always. already spilling into courts. Eventually, though, some version of a deal will get done at Navi Mumbai. Both sides need each other too much for the standoff to last forever. But the underlying shift is harder to reverse. For decades, owning Spectrum means owning the network. In the 5G era, Spectrum gets you to the door of a building

and then someone else decides what happens inside. The ceilings and the corridors of India's airports, malls and office towers are because, coming telecom infrastructure. And the companies building them have no spectrum, no licenses, and increasingly all the leverage. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium

podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.