According to the telecom market research firm, Infonetics, Huawei is leading the broadband customer premise equipment (CPE) market in 2012, followed by ZTE in second place.
Both the vendors have been able to increase their market share by spearheading fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) roll-outs for operators like China Telecom and China Unicom. Infonetics points out that despite the broadband CPE revenue declining by three per cent sequentially in the fourth quarter of 2012, the revenue for broadband CPE devices increased by 13 per cent to reach $7.7 billion. Further, the highest growth came from the cable CPE segment, where revenue grew by 26 percent year-over-year.
As per the research firm, cable operators are gaining significant traction with DOCSIS 3.0 in North America, Europe, Korea, and Japan. These countries are in the early stages of rolling-out video gateways which combine DOCSIS CPE with video transcoding capabilities. Also, DSL CPE shipments declined by four per cent in 2012 whereas VDSL CPE shipments registered a growth of 39 per cent reaching 29 million units in 2012.
The growth in the broadband CPE market in 2012 was driven by the combination of ongoing technology shifts and the need to support legacy broadband services and subscribers. Further, in 2012, half of all the DSL units sold were Wi-Fi enabled. The growth of Wi-Fi-enabled CPE indicates that the service providers are moving to more integrated devices to control the user experience in the home.
Infonetics expects FTTH CPE vendor market share to shift in 2013 on account of huge shipments by China. As of 2012, there were 57 million FTTH subscribers and 111 million cable broadband subscribers across the globe.
