An uptick in second quarter service provider spending on GPON and EPON fiber to the premises (FTTP) network equipment to serve residential and businesses benefited three of the largest vendors: Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), and ZTE, according to Infonetics Research. Not far behind the top three vendors were ECI Telecom and ADTRAN (Nasdaq: ADTN), which the analyst firm said showed "strong growth" during the quarter.
Overall, the global broadband aggregation market, which includes PON, FTTH and DSL equipment, grew 6 percent sequentially during the second quarter, to $1.6 billion.
"Thanks to increases in PON equipment spending across the globe--particularly Gigabit PON (GPON)--the broadband aggregation equipment market bounced back in the second quarter," said Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics.
Sales of EPON and GPON saw the greatest growth in North America and the EMEA region.
In North America, the FTTP story was all about EPON. Although spending dropped 8 percent in the second quarter after a 240 percent gain in the first quarter, shipments of EPON gear to cable operators, used mainly to deliver business services based on DPoE (DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON) continued to rise.
EMEA was a tale of two access methods. Despite seeing a sharp decline in DSL equipment revenue, total revenue for broadband aggregation gear in EMEA rebounded during the second quarter.
Heynen said that "PON equipment revenue jumped 71% over the previous quarter, aided largely by projects in Russia that boosted the revenue of Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel-Lucent and ECI, the primary suppliers of GPON equipment to Russian operators."
However, in Western Europe service providers such as Belgacom, KPN, BT (NYSE: BT), France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom have forgone FTTP in favor of a fiber to the node (FTTN)-based architecture using VDSL2 over the existing copper pairs that reach into each home and business.
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