In 2022, the market for broadband access equipment generated $19 billion in revenue, which was mostly driven by PON investments, according to a new analysis from Dell’Oro Group. The income for PON OLTs and ONTs grew to $11.7 billion last year, indicating the fifth year in a row that PON equipment has seen an increase in yearly revenue.
2.3 million OLT ports were shipped worldwide for XGS-PON particularly. According to Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen, 30% of XGS-PON ports were delivered to Europe, and 31% were shipped to North America.
He continued by saying that Nokia had the highest market share for XGS-PON. In its Q4 earnings report, Nokia stated that its Fixed Networks and IP Networks businesses accounted for two-thirds of the vendor’s revenue from Network Infrastructure. Also, the business has partnered 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. According to Dell’Oro, as cable operators continue to develop their distributed access architecture (DAA) and fibre projects, remote PHY devices and virtual CMTS platforms also experienced considerable revenue growth.
Vecima Networks for Remote OLTs and Harmonic for vCMTS and Remote PHY devices were two notable cable vendors. The popularity of Vecima’s Remote OLT devices is “obviously continuing, driven primarily by the North American market,” Heynen previously told Fierce. Around half of Harmonic’s Q4 revenue comes from Comcast, and the business has revealed agreements with 11 tier-one providers to date.
As more cable operators switch to DAA over the next years, Heynen predicted that Harmonic and Vecima will continue to increase their respective shares.
Heynen noted that despite overall revenue increase, supply chain issues continue to affect the availability of equipment, especially 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.”
Heynen predicts that revenue from internet access equipment won’t increase as quickly in 2023 as it did in 2022.
“After two straight years of double-digit percentage revenue growth, total revenue will likely be flat to slightly up this year,” he added.