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Nokia on Thursday announced that it will extend manufacturing of fibre broadband equipment at its factory in Sriperumbudur near Chennai as the country enters the 5G era.

The GPON optical line terminals (OLTs) will be manufactured at Nokia's Chennai factory amid increased demand from customers in India and worldwide, the company said in a statement.

Nokia is currently a participant in the government's Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, and is extending its production capacity Chennai in response to growing demand.

"As the momentum towards 5G networks and new hybrid usage models push operators towards increasingly distributed network architectures, service providers are investing in fibre to build out and upgrade their existing networks," said Sandy Motley, President, Fixed Networks at Nokia.

Nokia is the leader in FTTx solutions globally and is innovating rapidly to introduce next generation PON solutions.

Demand for fiber is also shifting to new regions with the Asia-Pacific region seeing strong demand in markets like Japan, India and Southeast Asia.

Much of this demand will be seen in the form of fiber to the home (FTTH) but there is also significant demand from mobile network operators (MNOs) as they deploy 5G and need next-generation fibre in their transport networks to carry the expected surge in data traffic.

Nokia said its planned production of PON OLTs in India will give a boost to expand the company's production base and geographic reach.

"India is seeing massive demand for fibre 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," said Sanjay Malik, SVP and Head of India Market at Nokia.