Infonetics delivered the latest vote of confidence for the global broadband equipment market, saying that service provider spending on broadband aggregation equipment jumped 27 percent last year to $7.1 billion overall. Spending was evident across the PON, DSL and Ethernet FTTH segments and throughout all world regions, though spending was up only incrementally—about 1.7 percent–in the fourth quarter, compared to the previous quarter.
The Infonetics press release has more:
“The biggest spending increase for the year was in passive optical network equipment, followed by DSL aggregation equipment, as service providers upgrade their networks to offer subscribers premium data services to support the phenomenal growth in online video consumption, social networking, and other Web services,’ notes Jeff Heynen, Infonetics Research’s directing analyst for broadband access.”
Heynen further says DSL aggregation equipment revenue actually dropped about 1.6 percent in the final quarter of the year, with PON the bread winner, posting a 6.5 percent increase. Also, spending across the Americas was down in Q4, while the growth came from Asia-Pac and EMEA.
There seems to have been an uptick lately in U.S. carrier deployment activity with the broadband stimulus program, and several telcos have talked of increasing capex during 2011. However, when you look globally, countries like China really are carrying the broadband spending load, and you have to wonder what will happen in countries like the U.S. that have been leaning a bit on stimulus after the stimulus era is over.