"Metro WDM optical equipment is on fire,” says Michael Howard, principal analyst of Infonetics Research and author of a new report. “Optical Network Hardware.”
Metro equipment made up 74 percent of all optical network hardware revenue in the fourth quarter of 2004, according to the report.
"Worldwide revenue topped $380 million in 4Q04, a 30 percent increase from 3Q04,” says Howard. “Nearly every metro WDM manufacturer had a good-to-great quarter. Service providers are depending more and more on DWDM and CWDM for a range of access applications, and are starting to build more metro rings, increasing their dependence on WDM as the eventual basic metro transport layer. ROADM technology will further facilitate this trend."
According to the study, worldwide optical network hardware revenue grew 21 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2004 to $2.6 billion. The study reports that Alcatel, Cisco Systems Inc., Lucent, Marconi and Nortel Networks all had strong quarters, spurred by some help from “service provider capex flush.”
Worldwide revenue grew 10 percent to $9 billion between 2003 and 2004, and is projected to grow steadily through 2008, by Infonetics’ estimates.
The research firm says Alcatel had “a huge quarter and remains the number-one leader in worldwide revenue market share for total optical network hardware, both in 4Q04 and 2004.” Nortel, Huawei and Fujitsu are next on the list.
In 2004, Nortel and Tellabs lead in North America, Alcatel leads in EMEA, and Huawei leads in Asia Pacific, according to the report.
