India is both a large market and a large engineering base for this work. Ericsson and Nokia built much of the country's 5G network and run some of their biggest engineering centres here, Cisco's Bengaluru campus is one of its largest engineering sites outside the United States, and Amdocs does a very large share of its operator software engineering from India. Indian companies such as Tejas Networks, which designs and builds telecom equipment at scale, and Airtel, which writes more and more of its own software, are part of the picture too. Bengaluru is where this work is concentrated, far ahead of any other Indian city.
For an engineer, networking work sits close to the hardware. Much of the code is C and C++ on Linux, or firmware running inside a device, and it has to move traffic at enormous speed without dropping a packet. Telecom operator software is the exception, a world of billing and customer systems mostly written in Java.
Networking and telecom is one of the Industry Verticals of
The Market Segments start with the public network and the private networks every organisation runs, then follow the network into the home, out to places with no cable, and down to the chips inside its equipment.
The radio and fibre equipment, the operator's billing and customer software, and the operators themselves are here, like Ericsson, Nokia, Ciena, Amdocs and Airtel.
The switches, routers and Wi-Fi that offices, campuses and data centres buy and run for themselves come from companies like Cisco, Arista Networks, Juniper Networks, Extreme Networks and Infoblox.
The instruments that test a network, the tools that copy its traffic and the software that finds what went wrong come from companies like VIAVI Solutions, Gigamon and Riverbed Technology.
The Wi-Fi router in the home, and the software an internet provider runs inside it, come from companies like NETGEAR, Plume and Airties.
Satellite links for ships and aircraft, mesh radios for places with no signal and the cellular modules inside connected devices come from companies like Viasat, Skylo, AST SpaceMobile and Quectel Wireless Solutions.
The chips inside networking and telecom equipment are designed by companies like Lattice Semiconductor, Axiado and EdgeQ.
What networking and telecom companies hire software engineers for, and which roles they hire, is on