Nokia, a global telecom gear and equipment maker, has announced that it will extend manufacturing of PON optical line terminals (OLTs) in India. The company will be manufacturing the PON OLTs in its Sriperimbudur factory, located near Chennai. Nokia said that it has decided to extend manufacturing in India because of the increasing demand from local customers in the country as well as demand seen in the international markets. The demand for broadband is increasing in the country each year that goes by. More and more people are working from their homes and are also relying on OTT (over-the-top) content to get access to entertainment inside their homes.
Thus the telcos and the internet service providers (ISPs) in India are driving the deployment of fiber for providing fixed-line broadband services, and fibersation would also be important for the telcos to roll out 5G throughout the nation. Nokia is going to benefit from extending manufacturing within the country as it is already a part of the central government's Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme. By manufacturing in India, Nokia would be able to serve the entire Asia-Pacific region as there's strong demand for fiber in markets such as Southeast Asia, India and Japan.
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Nokia said that while most of the demand for fiber would be to provide the FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) services but there is also significant demand from the mobile network operators (MNOs) as they deploy 5G. Nokia’s planned production of PON OLTs in India will give a boost to expand the company’s production base and geographic reach.
Sandy Motley, President of Fixed Networks at Nokia, said, “The importance and criticality of high-speed broadband has never been more pronounced as it is today. As the momentum towards 5G networks and new hybrid usage models push operators towards increasingly distributed network architectures, service providers are investing in fiber to build out and upgrade their existing networks. Nokia is the leader in FTTx solutions globally and is innovating rapidly to introduce next generation PON solutions. We are happy to add the manufacturing capacity in India to better address increasing demand in the region and worldwide.”
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Sanjay Malik, SVP and Head of India Market at Nokia, said: “India is seeing massive demand for fiber connectivity from both fixed and mobile operators. OLT production at our Chennai plant will offer a timely boost to meeting this demand in a timely way. Service providers in India will benefit from the increased availability of both existing Lightspan product lines as well as upcoming GPON access nodes which offer smaller lower-density OLTs to suit a range of conditions and requirements.”