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NEPAL’S FIXED broadband market now has more than 3.1m subscribers, with WorldLink Communications holding some 32% of the total—the only ISP in the country to have crossed 1m active connections.
That milestone, reached in early 2025, reflects three decades of methodical infrastructure building by founder Dileep Agrawal, who started the company in 1995 as an email service provider using a shared satellite uplink. WorldLink now employs 5,500 people, covers 75 of Nepal’s 77 districts, operates 14,000 Wi-Fi hotspots and opened the country’s first Tier 3 data centre in Chandragiri in February 2025. In 2025 the International Finance Corporation and Standard Chartered Bank provided a $29m financing package for the company’s further network and data infrastructure expansion. By the measures most used to evaluate an internet company, WorldLink looks like a success.
The regulatory environment it operates in makes that success difficult to sustain. In December 2025 the Department of Revenue Investigation concluded that WorldLink had evaded more than Rs3bn in taxes, with penalties bringing the total claim to over Rs7bn. Investigators found that the company had applied an exemption for maintenance fees beyond what the law permits. Under Nepal’s Telecommunications Act, service providers must pay 4% of annual income as a royalty and 2% into the Rural Telecommunications Fund, but maintenance fees—which make up about 40% of ISP revenue—are only partly excluded from these calculations. Prosecutors in Lalitpur were preparing to file charges as of December. The case has not been resolved. WorldLink, a company that generated revenue of Rs1.1bn in 2024, is simultaneously raising $29m from the IFC and facing a tax claim worth roughly seven times its annual turnover. Both facts are currently true at the same time.
CG Communication, the internet arm of the Chaudhary Group, occupies a very different position: 80,854 subscribers as of early 2025, a 2.58% market share and a name that barely registers in the competitive tier dominated by WorldLink, Dish Home, Subisu and Nepal Telecom.
The company triggered a bandwidth war in Nepal when it launched 120 Mbps plans at a time when most competitors were struggling to deliver 80, and that contribution is real. But as an ISP, CG Communication is marginal, and the group’s ambitions lie elsewhere: in mobile. CG Telecom, a separate Chaudhary entity, spent years lobbying for a unified licence to offer 4G nationwide. In 2022 the NTA partially cancelled its limited mobility licence covering seven districts for non-renewal.
As of 2025 CG Telecom had not launched full-scale mobile services, hampered by regulatory issues, a pending unified licence application as well as spectrum allocation hurdles in the 900 and 1800 MHz bands. The company filed a Supreme Court petition to halt a spectrum auction that allocated the frequencies it needed to Ncell instead. That auction went ahead anyway.
Both WorldLink and CG are now named among the leading contenders for a basic telecommunications service licence if the government issues one for a third mobile operator. WorldLink CEO Keshav Nepal has said this: “If the government invites applications for a new operator, we will certainly participate.” He argues that WorldLink already has the infrastructure, investment capacity and technical expertise needed to operate a telecom company, and that a mobile licence would let it deliver affordable data services in rural areas where extending fibre-optic networks remains uneconomical.
That case is credible. WorldLink has real national coverage, real international investors and real infrastructure that a mobile overlay could leverage.
The trouble is what history suggests about the government’s ability to actually follow through. The debate over a third operator has followed a well-knownn cycle: almost every time a new government takes office, discussions begin on issuing licences. Regulators launch studies, identify potential applicants and prepare reports, but the process gradually loses momentum before any concrete decision is made.
The NTA formed a committee in October 2024. That committee is still studying. The new RSP government has expressed support. A new communications minister took office in April 2026. The feasibility report has not been published.
The main issue is that Nepal’s telecom regulatory environment has historically made it easier to obtain a licence than to operate one. Six mobile licences have been issued since liberalisation. Only two operators are currently running. UTL, which applied to renew its licence in June, has unpaid liabilities surpassing Rs7bn, and with renewal fees and a 15% penalty for late payment, the total outstanding amount could surpass Rs29bn. CG Telecom’s licence was partially cancelled for non-renewal. Smart Telecom is the subject of a criminal investigation. The graveyard of Nepali telecom operators is well populated, and the regulatory conditions that filled it—high licence fees, spectrum scarcity, a market too small to generate the returns needed to justify the investment—have not materially changed.
WorldLink has a better balance sheet than most of those failures. Whether that makes it a likely telecom operator or just the most credible of a set of unlikely ones is a question the NTA’s feasibility study will eventually have to answer, probably after the next government takes office. ■
