Fibre to the Home on the up says Ovum report

Optical fibre technology is finally starting to make significant inroads into the broadband space worldwide, at the expense of DSL, according to a market report by telecoms analyst house Ovum.

The report says that optical fibre broadband connections worldwide have grown 35 per cent in the first quarter of 2011 compared to the last quarter of 2010, while DSL terminations have dropped five per cent.

Fibre optical connections are free from the interference that commonly plagues copper wires that are used for DSL, making them capable of far higher speeds.

The report states that optical connections reached a total of 988,889 ports, which represents a growth of 182 per cent over the first quarter of 2010. Ovum found that that the Asia Pacific region has the greatest appetite for optical connections with 93 per cent of this growth coming from that region. Chinese infrastructure vendors have been the beneficiaries here, pushing Huawei, ZTE and FiberHome into the top three spots for PON (passive optical network) OLT (optical line terminal) ports. Other regions such as Europe, Middle East and Africa and South and Central America also reached their highest levels ever for fibre.

By contrast, the report noted that the growth for DSL lines, the defacto standard for broadband internet connections, slowed or turned to negative figures in some countries, due to the rise in Fibre to the Home (FTTH) or Fibre to the Building (FTTB).

Generally, though, internet connections worldwide are on the increase and author of the report Kamalini Ganguly said in a statement, “despite the sequential drop in the first quarter of 2011, year-on-year (YoY) shipments were higher in all regions, many supported by upgrades related to FTTN and FTTB rollouts. In fact, the first quarter of 2011 was another record quarter for VDSL2 (very high-speed digital subscriber line 2) shipments, which crested to 4.8 million ports.”

For VDSL Alcatel-Lucent currently leads the VDSL/VDSL2 market with 42 per cent market share, followed by Huawei with 22 per cent, and Ericsson with eight per cent.

The Broadband World Forum will  take place on 27th-29th September at the CNIT, La Defense, Paris, France.