WDM lifts optical revenues: The optical WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) equipment market segment saw its third consecutive quarter of growth, Infonetics Research said, recording $2.6 billion in sales for Q1 2013 and up 10 percent year-over-year. "On a year-over-year basis (1Q12 vs. 1Q13), total optical spending is down 5 percent, but this is only a result of massive cuts in legacy (SONET/SDH) spending over the past 12 months (down 30 percent)," said Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst. "I won't call it a recovery until WDM revenue is up by double-digit percents for several quarters on a year-over-year basis, but 2013 is looking good, especially in North America and China, where 100G rollouts are picking up speed." Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN), and Fujitsu lead the optical market, although Ciena is a larger supplier of WDM gear than ALU. News release
Dutch broadband connections steady: KPN remains the largest broadband provider in the Netherlands with 40.8 percent of subscribers, but the market is growing steadily, a Telecompaper quarterly report said. The Dutch broadband market grew by 37,400 net additions, or 0.6 percent, in Q1 2013, bringing the total number of broadband connections in the area to 6.65 million. Ziggo and UPC trail KPN in number of subscribers—with 26.6 percent and 15.6 percent, respectively. Article (sub req.)
Cloud infrastructure thunders: Service revenues for IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) leaped 56 percent year-over-year in the first quarter to more than $2 billion, Synergy Research Group said. Leading the pack by a large margin is Amazon Web Services (Nasdaq: AMZN) with 27 percent of the market, the same amount as all of 2012. "While I cannot imagine Amazon losing its grip on the market, cloud services are growing at such a pace that all the lead players should be able to see strong growth over the next five years," said John Dinsdale. "Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are playing catch-up with relatively recent IaaS service launches, while a raft of telcos are also getting into the game. The success of IaaS and PaaS will also take away some growth opportunity from managed hosting and colocation, causing some specialists in those segments to diversify into cloud services." Release