Tejas Networks is India’s first listed deep-technology telecom product company - the firm that built the country’s indigenous 4G/5G radio stack and now ships carrier-grade equipment into more than 75 countries. Founded in Bengaluru in 2000 by three telecom veterans and acquired by the Tata Group in FY22, it has grown from a wireline optical specialist into a full-stack telecom OEM spanning wireless, wireline, satellite and semiconductor domains. The engine underneath everything it builds is a proprietary “Software-Defined Hardware™” architecture - programmable chips and a common code-base that let the same box be sold worldwide with local software flavours and upgraded remotely without swapping hardware.
Business segments
A single integrated telecom-equipment engine, built on a common semiconductor-and-software platform, that sells wireless and wireline networking gear to carriers, governments and enterprises - the two product families share the same R&D core, the same manufacturing model and the same customer base.
1. Wireless: the indigenous radio network that put India on the 4G/5G map
Tejas designed, manufactured and deployed roughly 100,000 cell sites of 4G radio equipment for BSNL in under 18 months - one of the world’s largest single-vendor RAN rollouts - and is now taking that proven stack to operators in South Asia, South America and Africa.
- The BSNL anchor proves the stack - the network carries over 4 petabytes of data traffic daily and had 26 million active subscribers as of Q2 FY26, giving Tejas a live, at-scale reference for every other operator it pitches.
- Radios that speak both 3GPP and O-RAN - the WavePlexus family covers the full frequency band from 450 MHz to 4.9 GHz, including Massive MIMO 64T64R radios, and works in traditional or open architectures, so a single product line addresses both brownfield and greenfield deals.
- NEC licences the core, Tejas builds the radios - a USD 60 million technology-licensing deal gives Tejas access to field-proven Massive MIMO and converged 4G/5G core designs, which it can manufacture and supply to a global telco, compressing its time-to-market for 5G.
- Satellite and broadcast from the same chip - the SL-3000 software-defined radio chipset, with 27 international patents and over 100,000 units shipped, powers satellite-IoT terminals for fishing vessels and direct-to-mobile broadcast receivers inside laptops and handsets from Intel, HMD and Lava.
- Standards contributions open doors - 180-plus technical contributions to 3GPP in FY26, spanning 5G-Advanced, 6G and AI-native RAN, plus the CTO’s vice-chairmanship of the Bharat 6G Alliance, put Tejas inside the rooms where future network specs are written.
2. Wireline: the optical and broadband backbone that carries the world’s data
Tejas ships DWDM systems that push up to 1.2 terabits per second on a single wavelength, IP/MPLS routers that now connect over 55,000 village councils under BharatNet, and converged broadband platforms that blend fibre, copper and wireless from one box - making it one of the few vendors that can wire an entire network from the data centre to the living room.
- The TJ1600 family is the optical workhorse - with C+L band capability delivering up to 76.8 terabits per system and an alien-wavelength feature that lets carriers run 400G services over third-party 10G networks, it is deployed by PowerTel nationwide and by a Tier-1 Indian telco for 5G backhaul.
- One box, every access technology - the TJ1400 platform integrates GPON, XGS-PON, 50G-PON, Ethernet, LTE and optical transport in a single temperature-hardened shelf, so a broadband operator can serve dense urban apartments and remote rural homes with the same hardware.
- India’s largest indigenous router deployment - Tejas was selected as router OEM for seven of the twelve BharatNet Phase III packages, shipping over 17,000 IP/MPLS routers to connect more than 55,000 Gram Panchayats, which establishes it as a credible alternative to global router vendors.
- International wins are stacking up - 400G deployments in Europe, Cambodia, Ghana and Nigeria; a pan-African optical backbone upgrade for a wholesale connectivity provider; and a strategic partnership with Telecom Egypt that includes sharing the experience of BharatNet and NKN projects, training and manpower development, and a gateway to Africa and the Middle East.
- AI data centres are the next demand wave - the company is investing in 800-gig and 1.2-terabit products and a new hyper-scalable data-centre-interconnect platform, betting that AI traffic - projected to be 62% of all network traffic by 2033 - will force a rebuild of optical networks worldwide.
Software-Defined Hardware™ and semiconductor platform
Every Tejas product - wireless radio, optical transport, broadband access or satellite terminal - runs on a common architecture of programmable chips and shared software that lets the company add features, fix standards and switch geographies without changing the hardware.
- Programmable, not hard-wired - products use FPGAs, network processors and DSPs instead of fixed-function ASICs, so a 4G radio can become a 5G radio, or a DWDM line card can gain new modulation schemes, through a remote software upgrade rather than a truck roll.
- One code-base, many countries - the same product ships globally with country-specific software adaptations, which saves R&D costs and lets Tejas amortise development across a larger volume of units than a single-market competitor could.
- 350-plus semiconductor IPs and 676 patent filings - the portfolio spans optical systems, networking protocols, FPGA design and embedded software, with 147 new patents filed in FY26 alone, giving the company a defensible IP moat.
- AI inside the engineering process - GenAI tools are embedded in every stage of software development, from coding and test-plan creation to an autonomous build pipeline that detects and fixes failures in real time, while an AI-driven log analyser pinpoints root causes of customer issues instantly.
Group structure and partners
Tejas is a Tata Enterprise with a fabless manufacturing model, three wholly-owned subsidiaries and a recently absorbed semiconductor unit - and it goes to market through deep technology partnerships with NEC, Rakuten Symphony and TCS rather than building everything alone.
- Tata ownership, Tata board - Panatone Finvest (a Tata Sons subsidiary) holds 53.40%; the board includes the CEO of Tata Electronics, giving Tejas a direct line into the group’s semiconductor and supply-chain strategy.
- Saankhya Labs is now inside the company - acquired in stages through FY23 and amalgamated in September 2024, Saankhya brought over 250 R&D engineers, 73 patents, the SL-3000 chipset and customer relationships with ISRO, Indian Railways and US-based Ligado Networks.
- NEC and Rakuten are the wireless force-multipliers - NEC licenses its Massive MIMO and core technology; Rakuten Symphony contributes CU/DU software and cloud orchestration for joint Open RAN bids, so Tejas can offer a complete 4G/5G solution without developing every layer itself.
- TCS is the BSNL system integrator - Tejas supplies radios and baseband units to TCS, which stitches them into the full BSNL network, meaning Tejas books the revenue as India Private and gets a large-scale deployment without carrying the integration risk directly.