DSL shipments, the technology that probably excited us all and brought is to see visions of the broadband world, are now officially declining says US researcher Dittberner in its latest report.
It says that DSL port shipments fell 11% in 2008 and although 4Q08 shipments were actually larger than the immediately preceding quarter they were down 15% year on year. There were 22 Million DSL ports shipped in the quarter and annual shipments were just under 91 Million.
And that’s not all that’s changing in DSL, Huawei has finally overhauled Alcatel as the number one supplier and the two Chinese suppliers Huawei and ZTE now account for just under 45% of the global market for DSL ports. China is taking over.
Alcatel has been reminding us it is in the lead for the past 6 years and cumulatively will still be way ahead. UTStarcom was the only top ten vendor which saw its 2008 shipments exceed those of 2007. Huawei saw a slight decline, while the rest had double digit percentage decreases.
But the money that was there to be made is shifting to VDSL shipments which were up 59% as a result of 11 Million ports, mostly VDSL2. Here Alcatel-Lucent led once more, with ZyXel in second, NEC third and Huawei back in fourth. Also more and more of the ports were on IP-DSLAMs rather than the older style of DSLAMs which use ATM for the last mile which fell 58% during 2008.
The reason for Huawei and ZTE’s strength may be found in the table above, which shows that Asia Pacific is the only area of the market which is still increasing its DSL port shipments.
Dittberner forecasts that DSL shipments will go back to climbing in 2009 and 2010 to reach 100 million ports shipped, just below the record year of 2007, but much of this is down to network upgrades not straight forward customer growth and also by the Chinese government’s policy to encourage home PC ownership. DSL shipments will peak in 2012 and then decline for a decade.
Meanwhile Dittberner reckons that fiber to the home shipments rose some 71% in 2008 with 4Q08 shipments exceeding 3 million. There was slower growth than expected for Europe and Korea, but higher demand in China.
The Japanese market remains the main driver for FTTH, adding a little over 700,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter to close in on 14.5 Million FTTH and FTTB (fiber to the building) subscribers. The North American, Korean and China markets showed steady growth. That Japanese bias is shown by the success of Sumitomo and Mitsubishi in shipping 25% of all FTTH ports (see diagram).
Chinese vendors appeared for the first time in 2008 and their market share is expected to grow, but will not necessarily become dominant, as China is deploying more FTTB than FTTH.
The mix of technologies continues to shift, with GPON overtaking BPON and P2P Ethernet moving into second place behind GePON. GePON share should increase again now that China has chosen it for FTTH/FTTB deployments.
The company also just put out a report on the carrier router market with market shares shown below.
The top five router vendors in order were: Cisco with a 40% market share, Juniper, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson. Cisco’s quarterly revenue declined by 12%, while Juniper’s declined by 6%. Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent both were up slightly, while Ericsson posted another quarter of strong growth.