Fueled by aggressive Fiber to the Business (FTTB) deployments in the Chinese telecom market, the passive optical networking (PON) equipment market surpassed the $2 billion mark for the first time. According to Infonetics Research's Q409 PON and FTTH Equipment and Subscribers and Broadband Aggregation Hardware and Subscribers market share and forecast reports, worldwide PON equipment revenue rose to $2.18 billion, a 35 percent increase over Q4 09.
On a worldwide scale, PON equipment revenue jumped 26 percent sequentially in Q4 09, a factor it attributes to increased spending on Ethernet PON (EPON) equipment in China. At the same time, GPON also fared well as China Mobile, China Telecom and BSNL all stepped up their respective deployments during the fourth quarter.
Outside of Asia-Pacific, Infonetics forecasts that tier 3 service providers that win broadband stimulus award grants will help to grow the Ethernet FTTH market in 2010. A big contributor to this trend will be Google's ambitious 1 Gbps-capable open access network drive.
In a similar manner, China continues to fuel the growth of the Multi Service Access Platform (MSAP) market. Led by Huawei and ZTE, broadband aggregation DSL ports increased 11 percent to 92 million in 2009. At the same time, the lower cost of ADSL ports used in FTTB deployments drove revenues down 15 percent to $3.7 billion.
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