India's tier-1 cities have world-class connectivity. Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Delhi have fibre availability, 5G coverage, and redundant internet exchange infrastructure that compares favourably with most developed economies. The enterprise connectivity problem in India is not in these cities. It is everywhere else.

The majority of India's manufacturing capacity sits in industrial clusters in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Odisha — many of them in towns and peri-urban areas where connectivity infrastructure is inconsistent at best. Pharmaceutical cold chains extend into districts where 4G coverage drops out regularly. Agri-fintech platforms serve farmers in villages where the only connectivity is 2G.

For enterprises building digital operations that extend beyond metropolitan India, the last mile connectivity problem determines whether a field sales application works when an agent visits a customer outside a major city, whether IoT sensors in a rural cold storage facility can reliably transmit temperature data, and whether a logistics system can track deliveries as reliably in a smaller state as it does in Delhi.

Addressing this requires network architecture that assumes connectivity will fail — and builds resilience accordingly.