NOVEMBER 16, 2006 -- The number of subscribers to FTTH services in Japan increased 88% in 2005, reaching 5.4 million at the end of March, 2006. This has contributed to steady growth of an optical access network systems market of 76.2 billion yen (approx. $645 million) in terms of sales in 2005, says a report published by Yano Research Institute Ltd.
Yano's research has focused on the market trends of major optical transmission systems such as SONET/SDH, WDM, and CWDM as well as PON systems and media converters. The firm has compiled a report, "Fiber-Optic Telecommunication Market in Japan 2006," based on this research.
According to the report, the Japanese market includes 65.5 billion yen (approx. $555 million) for PON systems and 10.7 billion yen (approx. $90.7 million) for media converters. The sharp increase in the number of subscribers to FTTH, which almost doubled in fiscal 2005, has apparently contributed to the growth of the market.
The biggest factor that has contributed to the increase of FTTH subscribers is the lowered fees for optical IP phone service with 0AB-J numbers (conventional telephone numbers) portability, and lowered monthly fees for broadband Internet access services. Most major telecommunication carriers commented that approximately 60% to 70% of new subscribers had concurrently subscribed to their optical IP phone services, emphasizing the cost for "FTTH and IP phone" is now lower than the cost for "ADSL and conventional analog phone," in terms of monthly basic fees.
In conjunction with the increase of subscribers and the growth of the access systems market, the demand of transmission systems for metro and core applications, such as CWDM, has been increasing since each telecommunication carrier had to increase the capacity of their networks to cope with the rapidly increasing traffic.
Yano estimates that the total number of FTTH subscribers would exceed 27 million by the year of 2011, with over 3 million annual net increases of FTTH subscribers each year until then. Further, they forecast that the demand for access systems would hold at approximately the same level as or even slightly higher than fiscal 2005 for several years thereafter. In addition, each major telecommunication carrier is expected to invest more on the systems for core and metro networks, such as WDH and SONET/SDH, in or after the second half of fiscal 2006 as features and functions required for Next Generation Network applications become more specific.
More information about the report can be found here.
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