The optical transport equipment market grew to a new quarterly record of $3.5bn in Q2/2008, according to the Dell’Oro Group’s Optical Transport Quarterly Report. “The optical equipment market had another strong quarter with revenues growing 13%, far exceeding expectations,” says Jimmy Yu, director of Optical Transport research at Dell’Oro. With the exception of North America, all regions reported sequential growth in optical revenue, with Asia Pacific growing the most strongly. The top vendors were Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, and Nortel, garnering nearly 50% of market share collectively.

“DWDM [dense wavelength division multiplexing] equipment sales continued on their growth trajectory, with a 24% growth rate as service providers increased their installation of long-haul capacity and 40Gb/s wavelengths,” Yu says.

There are six vendors shipping 40Gb/s wavelengths. The leading vendor continues to be Nokia Siemens Networks, with Nortel following closely in second. “In addition, we believe that Ciena and Nortel continued to ship naked-40Gb/s long-haul systems, where the transponder is not located in the vendor’s DWDM terminal, but rather in a core router such as Cisco’s CRS-1,” Yu added.

Source:semiconductor-today