The broadband access equipment market reached a record $19 billion in revenue in 2022, largely fueled by PON spending, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group. Revenue for PON OLTs and ONTs increased to $11.7 billion last year, marking the fifth consecutive year of annual revenue growth for PON equipment.
For XGS-PON specifically, 2.3 million OLT ports were shipped worldwide. Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen told Fierce 31% of XGS-PON ports were shipped in North America, while 30% were shipped in EMEA.
He added Nokia stood out in terms of market share for XGS-PON. Nokia in Q4 earnings said its Fixed Networks and IP Networks divisions represented two-thirds of the vendor’s Network Infrastructure revenue. The company has also teamed up with Telefonica to trial 25G PON technology in Spain.
On the cable equipment front, total cable access concentrator revenue was up 1% year-on-year at $1 billion. Remote OLTs recorded the highest revenue gain by far, Heynen noted, as revenue was “up 526% from 2021.”
“Remote OLTs grew largely because of edge-out deployments by Charter, as part of their RDOF buildouts,” he said.
Remote PHY devices and virtual CMTS platforms also recorded significant revenue gains, Dell’Oro indicated, as cable operators continue to expand their distributed access architecture (DAA) and fiber initiatives.
Cable vendors that made a mark included Vecima Networks for Remote OLTs and Harmonic for vCMTS and Remote PHY devices. Heynen previously told Fierce momentum for Vecima’s Remote OLT products “is clearly continuing, driven specifically by the North American market.” As for Harmonic, the company has disclosed deals with 11 tier-one operators to date and almost half of Harmonic’s Q4 revenue came from Comcast.
“I do expect Harmonic and Vecima to continue to grow their respective shares as more cable operators migrate to DAA over the course of the next few years,” Heynen commented.
Despite overall revenue growth, Heynen pointed out he’s still seeing supply chain constraints impacting equipment availability, including PON ONTs and cable CPE.
“Though the supply chains are improving, vendors are still reporting significant backlogs,” he said. “In the broadband space, supply chains have actually performed pretty well. However, demand remains incredibly high.”
Looking ahead to 2023, Heynen doesn’t expect broadband access equipment revenue to grow at the same rate as that of 2022.
“After two straight years of double-digit percentage revenue growth, total revenue will likely be flat to slightly up this year,” he added.