A host of new copper fiber broadband deployments by service providers in Asia Pacific, EMEA and North America drove up broadband aggregation revenues past $2 billion during the second quarter.
According to Infonetics Research's second-quarter 2014 PON, FTTH, and DSL Aggregation Equipment and Subscribers report, worldwide broadband aggregation equipment revenue (DSL, PON, and Ethernet FTTH) reached $2.1 billion, up 17 percent sequentially and 19 percent year-over-year.
Overall global spending on all broadband product segments rose year-over-year: Ethernet FTTH jumped 45 percent, DSL aggregation rose 21 percent and PON increased 15 percent.
Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research, attributes the results to what he calls service providers "binging" on broadband by expanding their GPON and VDSL2 with vectoring deployments.
Growth of GPON and VDSL2 was mainly seen in both China and EMEA.
Driven by deployments by China's largest telcos such as China Telecom and China Unicom, GPON equipment sales were up 19 percent sequentially during the second quarter, and up 44 percent from the same period a year ago. Likewise, VDSL ports grew to 6.6 million during this period, particularly in EMEA as service providers such as Orange and Deutsche Telekom prepared their lines to incorporate higher speed services over their existing copper lines.
North America sales were also up following what is traditionally a slow first quarter. AT&T (NYSE: T) and CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) both have made various announcements about rolling out 1 Gbps service to various cities in their footprints.
"'Gigabit' has become the mantra of the North American market, resulting in an acceleration of FTTH network investments," said Heynen. "Meanwhile in Europe, vectoring VDSL2 deployments continue to ramp quickly."
The research firm said that it expects broadband spending to increase later this year when service providers like CenturyLink and Frontier Communications begin work on their Connect America Fund (CAF) projects to extend service to harder to reach rural areas.
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