It was one of only three shared reference testing labs worldwide – and now having moved to its new home inside Bangalore’s Manyata Tech Park, it is also one of the largest development centres of Nokia Siemens Networks, the telecom infrastructure arm of the Finland-based mobile phone giant.
On Saturday, Finland’s Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, inaugurated the 53,000 sq.metre facility , with a 512 MBPS communication backbone, which will soon house a third of NSN’s entire Indian workforce, including 2300 engineers.  Interestingly, its  inheritance of the original Siemens business  makes Nokia-Siemens, one of the  earliest  tech providers in India -- going back to 1867, when it laid  the Delhi -Calcutta telegraph line.
With  150,000 telecom base stations in India – growing at 5000 every month – and serving 150 million customers of all the leading cellular providers including Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Idea, Tata Tele services, Vodafone as well as newcomers like Uninor, the new development centre one of NSN’s 24 worldwide, is smack in the middle of the world’s fastest growing mobile market. The centre is already working on next generation telecom transport technology said Johann Haslinger, Head of the Bangalore development centre.
A secure information network was fundamental to achieving an open trading environment as well as an ‘always on’ society, Prime Minister Vanhanen said. “The digital divide is the greatest threat to the information society where the citizen is at the centre of things”. Clearly this is something that is central to official thinking in Finland -- the first nation in the world to include Internet access among the fundamental rights of her citizens.

Feb 8 2010