In August 2019, the Government of India revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, restructured Jammu & Kashmir into two Union Territories, and imposed a communication blackout. No internet. No mobile calls. No landlines. For months.
It lasted 213 days — the longest internet shutdown ever recorded in a democracy. The longest mobile blackout too. When 2G finally came back in early 2020, it came back capped, monitored, and unreliable. 4G took until February 2021. By then, a full year and a half of remote work, remote education, and economic activity had been lost. For a region already behind the national curve on income and opportunity, it was devastating.
I was fifteen in 2019. I had been building websites for three years. I spent those months reading whatever I had saved locally and thinking about what the network actually meant — not abstractly, but concretely. Who couldn't work? Who couldn't study? Who lost a sale they couldn't reclaim? The internet had always been slow in the valley. Now it was gone. And when it came back, it came back slower than before.
What the problem actually is
Kashmir's internet problem is not primarily a demand problem or a technology problem. It is a last-mile infrastructure problem compounded by a complicated regulatory environment.
The backbone connectivity exists. Undersea cables reach Mumbai. The national fiber grid runs through the country. But reaching a household in a Srinagar neighborhood — or a village in Anantnag, or a cluster of homes up near the Line of Control — requires physical infrastructure: fiber conduits, junction boxes, drop cables, last-meter termination. That infrastructure is expensive to deploy, requires boots on the ground, and has historically been dominated by a small number of large national ISPs who have had little incentive to invest in high-quality delivery to a market they consider complicated.
The result: most residential customers in the valley get internet over DSL (old copper telephone lines) or mobile data. DSL speeds in residential areas routinely run at 2–5 Mbps. Mobile data is better in theory but degrades badly in dense urban areas and disappears in dead zones that Kashmir has in abundance. Neither is good enough for video calls, which is what remote work and remote education require.
Why ViberNet
I started ViberNet in 2024 with a specific thesis: the only durable solution to Kashmir's internet problem is locally-owned, fiber-to-the-home infrastructure operated by a team that lives here.
A national ISP optimizes for national averages. Their engineering decisions, pricing decisions, and support SLAs are calibrated for Bangalore and Delhi and Pune. When something breaks in Srinagar on a winter afternoon — and things break; cables freeze, junction boxes flood, power cuts happen — a local team can dispatch in an hour. A national NOC can ticket and wait for three days.
We're deploying OLTs (Optical Line Terminals) — the hardware at the core of a fiber access network — and running fiber directly to homes and businesses. Not shared-tower wireless with contested bandwidth. Not DSL riding century-old copper. Dedicated fiber, individual wavelengths, real speeds. The kind of connection that doesn't get worse when your neighbor also gets online.
What's hard
Everything, essentially. Rights-of-way for laying cable are negotiated building by building, pole by pole. Permissions involve multiple government bodies whose jurisdictions occasionally overlap in ways that nobody has officially resolved. Power is inconsistent — our infrastructure runs on UPS and generator backup because it has to.
Finding engineers who want to build ISP infrastructure in Kashmir, rather than leave for Bangalore, is its own challenge. The talent exists. The pull to leave is real.
But here's what's not hard: the demand. Every business owner who relies on a video call that drops, every student who buffers through a class, every remote worker who has explained their connection for the hundredth time — they all know exactly what they need. The market isn't skeptical of the product. It's been waiting for it.
The broader point
Kashmir's internet problem is not a metaphor. It is a specific, solvable, engineering and operations problem. The solution requires capital, permissions, physical labor, and sustained commitment. It does not require waiting for a national company to decide the market is worth it.
That's what ViberNet is: a bet that local can work. That a team from the valley can build the infrastructure the valley needs. We're not done. We're not even close to done. But the work is underway, and the fiber is going in the ground.