Two months back it had announced to set up a mobile handset manufacturing plant in Chennai, which will start production during the first half of next year.

Now the Finnish vendor has planned to market its Indian-made BSC at the same time. It will make Nokia the only vendor having production plants of both network infrastructure and handsets in the South Asia.

This announcement coincides with the Indian operators' aggressive expansion plans of respective GSM mobile networks over the next few years. Nokia believes its position will be strengthened in the fiercely competitive and fast-growing Indian cellular mobile market.

"India is already amongst the top five telecoms markets in the world and is set to reach the third position in the next few years," said Simon Beresford-Wylie, Nokia's executive vice president and general manager of networks. "Rapid expansion of mobile networks will be essential to sustain this growth."

Nokia's investment in the high-end and complex BSC manufacturing in India is

aimed at meeting this requirement. "It will allow us to tap into the talented engineering pool in India, in addition to creating additional employment," Simon said.

Nokia already runs three research and development facilities in India.

The proposed BSC and handset production plants are expected to uniquely position Nokia to work with Indian operators to reduce time to market for both infrastructure and handsets. The Indian government has set the target of having 200 million mobile subscribers by 2008. India charges the world's' lowest tariff to the mobile phone users.