PON equipment cashes $2 billion for first time

NEW YORK, USA: Worldwide passive optical network (PON) equipment revenue jumped 26 percent sequentially in 4Q09, driven by increased spending on Ethernet PON (EPON) equipment in China, says Infonetics Research, an anlyst company.

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For the 2009 year, worldwide PON equipment revenue hit $2.18 billion, up 35% from 2008, and is forecast by Infonetics Research to more than double by 2014.

Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband and video at Infonetics Research, says: "Another spike in the Chinese FTTB market continued to drive growth in both EPON and MSAP revenue, as the major Chinese operators look to pass nearly 25 million homes this year with a combination of ADSL and Fast Ethernet connections via MSAPs, which are being fed by EPON links for network-side access."

GPON deployments shot up in 4Q09 as a result of major increases in shipments to China Mobile, China Telecom, and BSNL.

"Every region saw an incremental increase in DSL port shipments and revenue this quarter, though Asia Pacific was by far the biggest beneficiary, seeing a US$100 million sequential revenue jump. Meanwhile, GPON deployments also shot up this quarter, thanks to a major increase in GPON shipments to China Mobile and China Telecom, as well as continued bulk OLT and ONT shipments to BSNL as part of their 700,000-line GPON buildout," notes Heynen.

Tier 3 operators and municipalities in the US, utilizing Broadband Stimulus funds, will help power the Ethernet fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) market in the coming year, especially after Google's announcement that it will be working with munis to deploy a fiber network capable of delivering 1G of bandwidth to subscribers.

Ethernet FTTH and PON FTTH subscribers are forecast by Infonetics to top 100 million worldwide by 2014.

Chinese telecom operators were the catalysts for growth in the broadband aggregation hardware market in 4Q09 as well, helping drive DSLAM, NGDLC, and MSAP vendor revenue up 14 percent to over $1 billion.

Driven largely by the growth in MSAP deployments in China, worldwide broadband aggregation DSL ports increased 11 percent to 92 million in 2009 from 2008, but because of the lower cost of the ADSL ports used in FTTB configurations, revenue actually decreased 15 percent to $3.7 billion.

Based mainly on strong MSAP sales, Huawei and ZTE posted large enough gains in broadband aggregation hardware revenue share over the last 5 years to take the #1 and #2 spots, respectively, for the first time in 2009.

Alcatel-Lucent maintains its lead in worldwide DSLAM revenue share.