The development comes midst efforts by China to merge two of the nation’s top wireless carriers to speed up the development of 5G mobile services. 5G will play a strategic and significant role in the coming years.

On Wednesday, Finland’s mobile telecom network maker Nokia stated, it has signed a $2.3 billion (2 billion euros) deal with China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom for the delivery of 4G radio and fixed access equipment, IP routing and optical transport equipment and other services through 2019.