Nokia’s Broadband Business Sees Growth As COVID19 Continues to Pressure Networks

Finland based telecom equipment manufacturer Nokia is witnessing an increase in orders as its clients are looking to upgrade their networks in order to meet the increased user demand during the Covid19 pandemic.
According to Sandy Motley, Nokia’s President of Fixed Networks, many of the clients had planned to grow their network by 30-40 percent over the course of next few years. However, Covid19 brought a massive demand overnight.
“Customers will need to accelerate the growth that they had planned in the future, and we’ve seen customers already talking to us about that,” Sandy said, adding orders for fixed networks were up 22% in the first quarter.
The Finnish brand boosted its fixed line network business with the 2016 take over of Alcatel-Lucent in a 15.6 billion euro deal. The unit’s revenue eventually fell 18 percent year on year in the first quarter and 5 percent between 2018 and 2019. However, Sandy said it was due to business cycles.
“We have seen some upgrades from our customers… but we think a lot of this drive will be more medium term and long term,” Motley said.
On the other hand, the European Commission has proposed that by 2025 each European household should have access to networks offering download speed of at-least 100 MBPS. According to a report by research firm Analysys Mason, fixed broadband lines carry 90 percent of all internet traffic in Europe.
Back in 2019, Nokia’s fixed access business amounted to as much as 10 percent of the company’s main networks business sales, with Mobile Access accounting for 64%.