India's National Fiber Policy 2026 has one line in it that should make every small ISP founder sit up: "One Nation, One Network." The government wants fiber treated like a shared utility, with a public agency managing open access so no single company controls the pipes.
I run ViberNet, a fiber ISP in Kashmir. My entire competitive advantage is that I own my cables. So when the policy conversation shifts from "who lays fiber" to "who gets to use whose fiber," that is not an abstract question for me. It is the business.
What the Policy Actually Proposes
Strip away the language and the National Fiber Policy 2026 is trying to fix three real problems. First, redundant digging: in most Indian cities, three different operators trench the same road in the same year to lay three parallel cables. Second, coverage gaps: nobody digs where the economics are bad, which is why fixed broadband still sits around 20% of households. Third, gatekeeping: whoever owns the duct can lock competitors out of a neighborhood.
The proposed fix is a common infrastructure layer. The government focuses on laying the unprofitable rural backbone, the way BharatNet already connected over 2.1 lakh gram panchayats. Private operators build in the cities. And a fiber agency sits in the middle, making sure the resulting network is open to any service provider at fair rates.
On paper it sounds like the end of the private fiber moat. Dig once, share everything, compete on service alone.
The CapEx Question Every Small ISP Faces
Here is the tension nobody spells out. The traditional model for starting an ISP in India is capital expenditure heavy: you raise or save money, you buy cable and poles and OLTs, you dig, and you own an asset that pays you back over a decade. That is exactly how I have built ViberNet, meter by meter, without investors.
The industry is drifting the other way, toward an operational expenditure model where operators lease infrastructure instead of building it. Big telcos already share towers. The policy wants the same logic applied to fiber strands and ducts.
If open access becomes real, the question for someone like me is blunt: is my buried cable a moat, or is it about to become a commodity that anyone can rent access to? A founder who spent three years trenching Srinagar lanes has a right to ask.
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Why I Am Not Panicking
Three reasons, all learned on the ground rather than from a policy paper.
First, the gap between policy and trench is enormous. BharatNet laid nearly 7 lakh kilometres of cable, and the FTTH connections actually commissioned on top of it number around 12.8 lakh. That is a rounding error against India's 300 million plus households. Backbone is the easy 80%. The last mile, the part where you argue with a landlord about drilling a hole and climb a pole in January sleet, is the hard 20%. No shared-infrastructure agency shows up for that.
Second, we have already run this experiment at small scale. TRAI's PM-WANI tariff cap forced ISPs to sell bandwidth to public Wi-Fi resellers at no more than twice retail rates. I wrote about that scheme from the supplier's side, and the lesson was the same: when access gets cheaper and more open, the fiber owner does not lose. The fiber owner becomes the wholesale layer everyone else depends on. Open access to my cables is another word for customers I did not have to acquire.
Third, ownership is only half of what a local ISP actually sells. The other half is a phone number that gets answered, a technician who arrives the same day, and a network map that lives in someone's head because he personally strung every span. Policy can nationalize ducts. It cannot nationalize the guy who knows which junction box floods in March.
What I Would Do the Day Open Access Arrives
Still, pretending the policy changes nothing would be lazy. If a genuine shared fiber layer arrives in Kashmir, here is how I think ViberNet adapts.
Lease strands out, not just in. If the framework compels sharing, my buried glass becomes rentable inventory. Dark fiber leasing is a business with better margins than retail broadband, and I would rather be the landlord than the tenant.
Expand over shared backbone. The villages I currently cannot justify trenching to become reachable the moment a subsidized duct passes nearby. Government fiber to the block, ViberNet fiber to the home. That was my read on BharatNet, and this policy doubles down on it.
Compete on service before I am forced to. If the long-term direction is that infrastructure gets commoditized, the winners will be whoever built the strongest service reputation while they still had an infrastructure advantage. That work starts now, not when the regulation lands.
Networks Outlive the People Who Build Them
My surname comes from the Shah Mir dynasty, which ruled Kashmir in the 14th century. What survived from that era was not the palaces or the treasuries. It was the infrastructure and the administration, the roads and systems that ordinary people used long after the rulers changed. I think about that when I read a policy proposing that fiber should outlast the companies that laid it.
Honestly, the instinct behind One Nation, One Network is right. Fiber is closer to a road than to a product, and India digging the same street three times is a waste everyone pays for. My job is not to fight that direction. My job is to make sure that when the network becomes shared, the service on top of it still has my name on it.
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