Metro optical market 'on fire'

Global optical network hardware revenues grew 21 per cent between the third and fourth quarters of 2004 to $2.6bn as service providers embarked on a capital expenditure spree, research has found.

Infonetics Research's quarterly worldwide market share and forecast report said that Alcatel, Cisco, Lucent, Marconi and Nortel all had strong quarters, pushing worldwide sales up 10 per cent to $9bn between 2003 and 2004.

The analyst firm expects the upward trend to continue steadily through 2008. "Metro Wave Division Multiplexing [WDM] optical equipment is on fire," said Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics and author of the report.

"Worldwide revenue topped $380m in the fourth quarter of 2004, a 30 per cent increase on the previous quarter. Nearly every metro WDM manufacturer had a good to great quarter."

Howard added that service providers are depending more and more on Dense WDM equipment for access applications, and are starting to build more metro rings.

The study found that Alcatel had a "huge quarter" and remains the leader in worldwide revenue market share for total optical network hardware, both in the fourth quarter of 2004 and the whole year. Nortel, Huawei, and Fujitsu brought up the rear.