Uttar Pradesh just launched something called Project Ganga — high-speed internet to 57,000 gram panchayats, more than 20 lakh families, rolled out in phases starting with 21 districts. It's part of a bigger story: BharatNet has now connected over 2.15 lakh gram panchayats with fiber across the country. The government is laying last-mile fiber at a scale no private ISP can match.
I run ViberNet, a fiber ISP doing exactly this kind of last-mile work in Kashmir, street by street, with our own crews and our own capital. So the obvious question: does a state-backed fiber rollout make what I'm doing pointless?
What government fiber actually delivers
BharatNet and programs like Project Ganga are connectivity infrastructure projects, not ISPs in the way ViberNet is an ISP. The model is usually: government or a public-private entity lays the backbone fiber to a panchayat building or a local exchange, and then local operators are supposed to take that last mile into homes.
That's a genuinely big deal for places that had nothing. A village that previously had no fiber backbone within 50 km now has one within walking distance. That changes what's possible — for schools, for health centers, for any local operator who wants to build a last-mile network on top of it.
But "fiber reaches the panchayat office" and "fiber reaches your house, with a static IP, a static SLA, and someone who picks up the phone when it goes down" are two completely different products. The gap between those two things is most of the actual work.
The part the government doesn't do
Government fiber programs are good at the thing governments are good at: large capital projects, right-of-way negotiation at scale, backbone deployment across thousands of locations on a schedule. They are not set up to do the thing that actually determines whether a household gets online — the last 100 meters, the customer premises equipment, the install appointment, the monthly bill, the truck roll when a goat chews through a drop cable.
That last-mile layer has always been left to local operators, and that's exactly the layer ViberNet operates in. A government backbone reaching a village doesn't replace us. If anything, it removes one of our biggest cost centers — backhaul. Instead of running our own long-haul fiber to reach a remote area, we can potentially connect to a BharatNet point of presence and focus our capital on the part that's hardest to do well: the household connection and the support behind it.
That's a real shift. It's the difference between "we have to build everything ourselves" and "the hard backbone work is partially subsidized — now we compete on execution."
Where this actually matters for Kashmir
Kashmir's connectivity gaps aren't evenly distributed. Srinagar and the bigger towns have multiple ISPs competing already — that's where ViberNet has been focused, because the economics work and the demand is there. The places that genuinely have nothing are smaller villages, especially in districts further from the city, where laying our own backbone fiber has never penciled out.
If a BharatNet-style backbone actually reaches those areas — and "actually reaches" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because rollout announcements and rollout reality are different things in Kashmir specifically — it opens up areas we couldn't justify building into before. Not because the government will serve those customers well, but because we'd no longer need to fund the backbone ourselves to serve them.
I've seen government connectivity announcements before that took years longer than promised, or delivered fiber to a building that then sat unused because nobody built the last mile. So I'm not planning around this happening on the announced timeline. I'm watching it. If a BharatNet point of presence shows up within reach of an underserved area, that's worth a site visit and a cost estimate. If it doesn't, nothing changes for us.
The bigger pattern: infrastructure gets cheaper, service gets harder to fake
This is part of a pattern I keep coming back to. Starlink made satellite backhaul a commodity. Government programs are making fiber backbone a commodity in more places. Hardware costs keep dropping. The raw infrastructure layer — the expensive, capital-intensive part — keeps getting cheaper or subsidized or built by someone with deeper pockets than any local ISP.
What doesn't get commoditized is the work of actually serving a specific household in a specific building in a specific neighborhood, reliably, for years, with someone local who shows up when it breaks. That work doesn't scale the way fiber backbone does. It has to be done street by street, and it has to be done by people who live where they're working.
So a bigger government fiber footprint doesn't threaten that part of the business — if anything, it makes the local execution layer more valuable, because it's the only part left that's still hard to replicate. The infrastructure race is being won by whoever has the most capital. The service race is still wide open, and that's the one that actually determines whether a household stays connected.
What I'm doing about it
Nothing dramatic. I'm not redrawing ViberNet's roadmap because of a press release. But I am adding "check for nearby BharatNet/Project Ganga points of presence" to how we evaluate new areas to expand into. If the backbone cost of reaching a new area drops because someone else already laid fiber to the panchayat office, that changes the math on whether an area that didn't make sense a year ago makes sense now.
The honest takeaway is the same one I keep landing on with these posts: infrastructure announcements from governments and infrastructure announcements from satellite companies both point the same direction. The capital-intensive part of this industry is getting easier. The part that requires someone to actually be there is not. That's where I'm putting my time.
If you're in an area near a new BharatNet rollout and want to know whether last-mile fiber is realistic for your street, get in touch — me@mehranshahmiri.com
Related: I Run a Fiber ISP. Here's What I Actually Think About Starlink. · The Internet Problem in Kashmir