While India has made significant progress in rolling out 5G services, the next generation technology 6G, will only make sense when 5G use cases are fully saturated and monetised, said Manoj Kumar Singh, Director General, Digital Networks.

Speaking to on the sidelines of India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2025 on the future of 6G rollout, Singh said that the country already has a strong base of users for 5G services, ANI reported.

“As the data speak that we have more than 65 million users for 5G. So it is not a question of 5G availability, but the question is the utilisation of 5G which we normally say the use cases,” he said.

He noted that the real gap lies not in the availability of the technology, but in understanding and leveraging its full potential.

“Where there is a gap, understanding the capability of the 5G is a gap. The gap is not the availability of the 5G. So that’s the way the whole focus has to be towards the monetisation and modernisation which will happen when there are multiple use cases,” Singh explained.

He further added that once 5G use cases are completely developed and monetised, they will pave the way for 6G.

“It will help operators also to encourage further deployment of 6G. But if I speak today, 6G definitely has a scope. But 6G scope will come when we have a completely saturated use cases of 5G. Then only the 6G use cases will make much more monetisation sense,” he said.

Talking about India’s digital infrastructure, Singh said, “So when you say we have a very robust infrastructure, I would say that yes, we are robust, but the uptake is faster than we can scale the infrastructure. So our consumption is rising more than the speed which we are deploying. So always there is a saturation. Definitely our scale of deployment is best in the world. But definitely considering the uptake in our country, it is to scale further.”

To counter this saturation, he suggested a cross-industry approach to infrastructure utilisation.

“One infrastructure cannot be dedicated to one sector. So we have to say it is a multi-utility infrastructure. We cannot have a standalone infrastructure for one sector. So the only way forward to meet this saturation is cross-industry utilisation,” he said.

Highlighting the challenges faced by the sector, Singh pointed out that the main hurdle is Right of Way (ROW) permissions.

“Even today the acceptability of putting the infrastructure deeper into the society is a challenge. We are still being treated like a revenue-generating organisation which is not the case. We are infrastructure,” he said, adding that awareness is needed to treat digital infrastructure as a lifeline and not just a revenue source.

He also appreciated the government’s role in supporting the telecom sector. “Without government support this infrastructure piece cannot work, and the government is very very active in getting support to us. So support is excellent,” Singh said.