In an otherwise dismal year for broadband access technologies, the total global revenue for PON optical line terminal (OLT) equipment grew to $3 billion in 2019, which was a 16% from 2018, according to research by Dell'Oro Group.
“Although 2019 was a challenging year for broadband access equipment vendors, with revenue dipping to levels not seen since 2012, there are positive signs that operators are committed to 10G upgrades to support premium broadband services,” said Dell'Oro Group's Jeff Heynen, senior research director, broadband access and home networking. “There will be pockets of growth in 2020, but increased competition is needed to spur additional spending."
In terms of 10G, total XGS-PON OLT port shipments increased a whopping 222% year-over-year as more operators moved towards 10 Gbps FTTH networks.
RELATED: Cable's virtualization drives down traditional hardware revenue
In Q4 of last year, total cable access concentrator revenues were down 30% year-over-year to $255 million, mainly due to a slowdown in traditional Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) products across all regions.
Other than mainly Comcast, which is working with Harmonic on virtual CCAP, the cable industry has been slow to adopt newer classes of Remote PHY and Remote MACPHY devices and virtual CCAP (vCCAP) products.
Despite Comcast and Charter Communications largely wrapping up their DOCSIS 3.1 network deployments, total DOCSIS 3.1 customer premises equipment (CPE) devices increased to 6 million in the fourth quarter of last year, representing a 67% of the total cable CPE shipments.