Broadband access equipment revenue hits $3.4b in Q4

The market was bullish in last year’s fourth quarter for broadband access equipment revenue, according to a report, but Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) spending declined.

Dell’Oro Group announced on Monday that broadband access equipment revenue hit $3.4 billion, growing 8% year over year in last year’s fourth quarter compared to the same quarter in 2017.

Increased shipments of GPON optical line terminals (OLTs) and DOCSIS 3.1 customer premises equipment (CPE) counteracted a decline in CCAP spending.

“FTTH deployments globally continue to show strength,” said Dell’Oro’s Jeff Heynen, research director, broadband access and home networking, in a prepared statement.  “Both 2.5 Gbps GPON and 10 Gbps EPON equipment marked year over year increases, particularly in China. The gains on the telco side helped to offset surprising weakness in cable CCAP spending, as MSOs delay new capacity purchases while they determine how to move forward with distributed access architectures (DAA).”

Among other capabilities, DAA will give the cable industry a better starting point for virtualized networks and software-defined networking. At last year’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, SCTE President and CEO Mark Dzuban said during a panel discussion that the cable industry needed to do a better job of defining DAA in order to launch it at scale.

Total cable access concentrator revenue was down 18% year over year, mainly due to a slowdown in CCAP license purchases in North America. Cisco, Arris, Casa Systems and Harmonic are among the leading CCAP vendors.

The total number of DSL port shipments grew 16% year over year with VDSL ports increasing 13% and G.fast ports increasing by a whopping 232%, according to Dell’Oro.

PON OTL shipments grew 6% over the same timeframe, driven by strong demand for 2.5 Gbps GPON units in China and across the entire Asia-Pacific region.

Overall, Dell’Oro’s fourth-quarter 2018 Broadband Access Quarterly report said that 2.5 Gbps GPON, 10 Gbps EPON and Gfast equipment all saw increased spending in the quarter.