DSL, cable broadband CPE market up 10pc

NEW YORK, USA: Worldwide revenue from broadband CPE grew 10 percent in 4Q09 from 3Q09 to $1.1 billion, says Infonetics Research, an analyst company.

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Jeff Heynen, directing analyst, broadband and video, Infonetics Research, says: "Now that many major cable operators worldwide are aggressively putting into place the infrastructure to support wideband and DOCSIS 3.0 services, we are now seeing more consistent quarterly shipments of wideband customer-premise equipment."

Quarterly growth was driven by 3 main factors:

Operators flushed their year-end CPE and broadband budgets, consumers upgraded to new devices over the holidays and Chinese operators continued spending on ADSL CPE to support higher speeds as part of their fiber-to-the-building (FTTB) rollouts.

"It started with modems earlier in 2009 and now includes both gateways and embedded multimedia terminal adapters (EMTAs). Though the numbers remain small relative to standard cable CPE, we expect wideband cable devices to ramp up quickly in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, nearing $3 billion worldwide by 2014," predicts Heynen.

For the full 2009 year, the worldwide broadband CPE market totaled $4.2 billion, down eight percent from 2008.

Technicolor (Thomson) regained the lead from Huawei for overall broadband CPE revenue in 4Q09, and held onto the #1 spot for the year as well, followed by Motorola and Huawei, who are in a very tight race for second.