Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia is seeing a pick up in orders as its broadband clients race to upgrade networks to meet higher user demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, a company executive said.

Many customers had planned to grow their network by 30 percent to 40 percent over the next few years assuming a similar growth in traffic, but COVID-19 brought in that traffic growth overnight, Sandy Motley, Nokia's President of Fixed Networks, told Reuters.

"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," she said, adding orders for fixed networks were up 22 percent in the first quarter.

Nokia boosted its fixed-line networks business with the 2016 purchase of Alcatel-Lucent in a EUR 15.6 billion (roughly Rs. 1.33 lakh crores) deal. The unit's revenue fell 18 percent year-on-year in the first quarter and 5 percent between 2018 and 2019 but Motley said the decline was due to business cycles.