MAY 24, 2007 -- According to Dittberner Associates' (search for Dittberner) "Broadband Shipment Analysis," global FTTH port shipments in 1Q07 declined 5% QoQ after a big jump in 4Q06. At 1.1 million ports, it was the second best quarter ever and was up 13% YoY. The decline, after the jump in 4Q06, was due to the change in the mixture of detached homes and apartments in the dominant Japanese market. It is expected that this changing mixture will continue to cause some lumpiness in the FTTH shipments for the foreseeable future, although the general trend remains upwards.
The FTTH market is still dominated by Japan and that market is increasingly dominated by NTT. With 4.5 Million FTTH subscribers NTT has about 5X the subscribers of Verizon, the next largest FTTH service provider and approximately 10X its nearest domestic competitor.
The top four suppliers were Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Hitachi, and Tellabs with 33%, 21%, 14%, and 11% market share, respectively. Siemens moved into the fifth place spot with 9% market share due to Siemens' success in the Korean market. FTTH was launched in Korea in the first quarter and Dittberner estimates a million ports should be shipped into this market in 2007.
GePON is still the dominant technology and this trend will not change in the next two years. However, BPON will decline quickly in the latter half of this year, especially when Verizon switches to GPON. With GPON being the chosen technology for North America and Western Europe shipments are predicted to be approaching 300,000 a quarter in 12 months.
With Japan growing at a rate of 3 million subscribers a year and Verizon and Korea likely to add 1 million and 800,000 subscribers, respectively, in 2007, Dittberner estimates the FTTH market will be 6.8 million FTTH ports. Feeling threatened by FTTH, cable operators are expected to quickly introduce DOCSIS 3.0, which will cause telephone companies to start deploying fiber even faster.
Dittberner's "Broadband Study" is an ongoing market research service updated quarterly, designed to track the BBxDSL and BBFTTX vendors and their potential. The study constitutes of business cases, case studies, and market forecast. For carriers, the "Broadband Study" provides lessons learned and vendor selection advice to lower decision-making risk. Vendors learn about carrier priorities, competitive threats, and niche market opportunities. Dittberner provides users of this service with fully interactive spreadsheets including actual and historical shipments.
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