Nokia announced on Thursday that it will expand production of fibre broadband equipment at its factory in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, as the country transitions to the 5G era.

The GPON optical line terminals (OLTs) will be manufactured at Nokia's Chennai factory in response to increased demand from customers in India and around the world, according to a company statement.

Nokia is currently participating in the government's Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme and is expanding its Chennai production capacity in response to rising 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 global leader in FTTx solutions and is rapidly innovating to introduce next generation PON solutions.

Fiber demand is also shifting to new regions, with the Asia-Pacific region experiencing strong demand in markets such as Japan, India, and Southeast Asia.

The majority of this demand will be for fibre to the home (FTTH), but there will also be significant demand from mobile network operators (MNOs) as they deploy 5G and require next-generation fibre in their transport networks to handle the expected surge in data traffic.

Nokia stated that its planned production of PON OLTs in India will help the company expand its 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.