India Targets 1 Billion 5G Users by 2030 at IMC 2026

India has set a target to reach one billion 5G subscribers by 2030, anchored by an infrastructure footprint that already covers 99.9% of the country's districts. Inaugurating the 10th edition of the India Mobile Congress in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined how the domestic telecom landscape expanded from 5G rollout to mass nationwide adoption, supported by more than 550,000 active base stations and ten-fold broadband speed increases since 2022.

The domestic market has undergone a dramatic pricing and consumption reset over the past decade. Average monthly data usage climbed from 0.26 GB to over 36 GB per user, while transmission costs dropped 97% to ₹8 per gigabyte. The central administration is leveraging these lower cost barriers to pivot domestic telecom firms from assembling imported hardware to developing domestic intellectual property, telecom equipment design, and indigenous microelectronics.

Beyond consumer bandwidth, the government is steering the sector toward deep-technology integration, including AI-native pre-6G networks, satellite connectivity, and sovereign cloud infrastructure. For enterprises and device manufacturers, the Department of Telecommunications also showcased expanded digital trust architectures, including the Sanchar Saathi fraud-prevention stack, signaling stricter operational oversight as wireless networks integrate deeper into banking and industrial automation.