Optical transport equipment market declines 5%

August 30, 2012 | By Sean Buckley

Carriers in North America, EMEA spent less money on gear

 "The optical market contracted in the first half of 2012 due to lower spending in the mature markets of North America and EMEA,' he said. "The emerging regions of Asia Pacific and Latin America, however, did grow as service providers in the regions continued to expand network capacity."

While the North America and EMEA optical markets declined 12 and 16 percent, respectively, Asia Pacific and Latin America grew 7 and 11 percent.

Two of the growth drivers in the optical technology revenue mix were WDM and Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS).

Driven by the service provider demand for 40G and 100G wavelengths, WDM equipment revenue rose 5 percent in the first half of 2012. Likewise, the adoption of POTS by carriers like Verizon and XO continued to rise and contributed to almost one-third of the optical market revenues during this period.

From a vendor perspective, Huawei has become the dominant optical player, capturing about 20 percent of the market in this period. Dell'Oro's ranking is in line with other analyst firms such as Infonetics, which said in its Optical Network Hardware vendor market share report that it saw similar seasonal gains by the Chinese vendor.