Communications and Technology Industry Research

Shipments of digital subscriber line, or “DSL,” ports declined 14 percent in the quarter just ended and 13 percent year-over-year, according to a new report from a Bethesda, Maryland-based telecommunications research firm.

 

Officials at Dittberner Associates Inc. say the two largest vendors saw the steepest drop in shipments and that the top three vendors’ collective market share fell from 77 percent to 72 percent quarter-to-quarter.

 

“For the second quarter in a row, Huawei displaced longtime leader Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), although Alcatel-Lucent remains the leader in rolling four quarter shipments,” the firm reports. “ZyXel grew as did UTStarcom with their presence in Asia’s markets. Ericsson (News - Alert) and Nokia Siemens declined as their traditional European markets’ overall subscriber growth slows.”

 

Generally speaking, DSL technologies that provide digital data transmission over the wires of a local telephone network. It can be used at the same time and on the same line with regular telephone, as it uses high frequency, while regular telephone uses low frequency.

 

Here’s how Dittberner breaks down market share for DSL port shipments in the third quarter:

 

 

VDSL – or “very high bitrate DSL,” provides faster data transmission over a single flat untwisted or twisted pair of copper wires. That means VDSL can support high-bandwidth applications such as HDTV, as well as VoIP and general Internet access, over a single connection.

 

According to Dittberger, VDSL shipments were down 17 percent in the third quarter, to 2.7 Million ports.

“Like last quarter, this was largely due to a change in fiber access deployments in Japan, in this case decreasing the number of apartments being connected with FTTB/VDSL,” the firm reports. “Alcatel-Lucent was the leader in VDSL shipments with ZyXel coming in second and NEC (News - Alert) third.”

  

Shipments correlated closely to regional subscriber growth which is mostly in the Asia-Pacific region, the firm says, especially China and Vietnam. The Caribbean and Latin American region shows the strongest percentage growth in the world, Dittberner says, while the mature markets in North America and Europe, the Middle East and Asia “are slowing considerably.”

 

“These trends will continue so vendors ought to be contemplating entering a niche market or harvesting their installed base in new and creative ways,” the firm says.