Nokia offers network in a box for rural broadband

Nokia announces a “network-in-a-box” fiber to the home (FTTH) kit aimed at rural broadband service providers. Nokia’s Broadband Relief Kit builds a town network of up to 1,000 homes, and the company said it’s set aside 25 of these kits for broadband providers. Nokia created the kit to address telecom supply chain deficit issues that are particularly affecting rural operators, while there’s plenty of money in the pipeline, thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), to make those buildouts happen. The network in a box addresses “hyper-localized markets,” said Sandy Motley, president of Fixed Networks at Nokia. Nokia bundles all the necessary FTTH equipment, software licenses, support, and in-home Wi-Fi gateways that a carrier needs to support 1,000 households. The kits support Gigabit Ethernet passive optical network (GPON) and 10 Gigabit-per-second symmetrical passive optical network (XGS-PON) over a single port and fiber.