Building India’s connected future on Power over Ethernet

Walk through any Indian city and you encounter a generation of devices that were not there a few years ago: cameras mounted on poles, sensors embedded in buildings, wireless access points in stations and marketplaces. Each of them depends on two things, a network connection and a power supply. How a country delivers both, at the scale India is now attempting, is among the less discussed but more consequential questions facing our digital infrastructure.

Power over Ethernet, usually shortened to PoE, offers an unusually clean answer. A single network cable carries both the data and the electricity a device needs, removing the need for a separate power line or a socket at every location. The underlying standards have been set by the IEEE for years, and a PoE switch supplies each connected device with precisely the power it draws, and no more.

A single cable lowers the cost of scale, and asks remarkably little in return

The logic is most apparent at scale. Wiring power separately to a hundred cameras along an arterial road, or to access points spread across a large campus, is laborious and expensive. PoE consolidates two cabling exercises into one. It reduces civil work, compresses timelines, and allows devices to be added incrementally rather than through repeated rewiring. As networks migrate from analogue to IP, and as connected devices multiply across smart buildings and public systems, the case for clean, centralised power delivery becomes difficult to ignore.

What is striking is how little the technology asks in return. There is no separate regulatory regime to satisfy; the requirements concern adherence to safety and interoperability standards, not the pursuit of fresh approvals. Nor does PoE call for any arrangement with the electricity distribution companies, since it manages low-voltage power within the network itself and never draws on the grid’s distribution. For an organisation weighing a large deployment, that freedom from administrative overhead is worth considerably more than it first appears.

Reliability and ease of adoption are built into the design

A reasonable concern, raised often, is what becomes of the network during a power cut when one cable carries both data and power. The reassurance lies in the architecture. A PoE device is not tied to the socket nearest to it; it is powered from a central switch, and that switch can be placed on backup supply. When the local supply fails, the camera or access point continues to run. Paired with quality structured cabling, typically Cat6A, Cat6E or Cat7, coverage holds and the network stays live without dead spots.

How much of an existing setup must change is, in truth, situational. It comes down to the balance between what a client expects and what a site genuinely requires. In most cases PoE integrates comfortably with what is already in place, which is precisely why it lends itself so well to retrofit work. That is no small advantage in a country building and upgrading at the same time.

The real test lies in deployment, and in how the network is run afterwards

This is not a theoretical proposition. The approach has proven itself in settings as varied as the Roseate Hotel in Delhi, the Neerukonda Institute of Technology near Visakhapatnam, PSBA School in Sambhajinagar, and the operations at Flipkart. Different sectors, comparable outcomes: networks that were quicker to commission and simpler to sustain.

Delivering power over a single cable matters only if the devices at the far end can also be managed without difficulty. No operator wishes to send an engineer out to each of a thousand cameras. Centralised management, whether through the cloud or a dedicated controller, answers exactly this, allowing an entire network, a single campus or a cluster of city zones, to be configured, monitored and maintained from one interface.

India’s digital ambitions, articulated through the Smart Cities Mission, Digital India, and the surveillance programmes taking shape across states, will not be realised by the software layer alone. A great deal depends on getting the fundamentals right beneath it. PoE belongs to those fundamentals. It is unlikely to command attention the way a new AI model does, and it does not need to. But much of what we are building in this country will run on these cables, and that is reason enough to take the layer seriously.

(The author is CEO & Managing Director, TP-Link India. Views are personal.)