SCENARIOS
Vladimir Kozlov
CEO AND FOUNDER, LIGHTCOUNTING MARKET RESEARCH
“In 2016, we saw considerable sales of 100G DWDM and 100GbE products. The total market for optical components and modules was forecast to grow by 17% in 2016, with sales of DWDM and Ethernet products increasing by more than 30%. However, with the exception of DWDM and Ethernet optics, market segments are likely to remain flat or decline.”
“China is number one in the world in number of FTTH customers, even though the speed of connections is below the global average. A large amount of bandwidth is deployed in the last mile, near the customer, but this is not high throughout the network. Metro aggregation networks tend to lack capacity, hence the recent activity in Chinese markets.”
“Overall expectations for 2017 are high. Demand will keep suppliers of optical components and modules very busy. In fact, in 2016, global supply had difficulty keeping up with demand. If this had not been the case, the market would have grown even faster. We haven’t seen anything like this happen for at least ten years. 2017 will be a very strong year. In China, projects tend to be incredibly large and tend to move very fast. Many FTTx projects have been carried out over the past five years, of which a large number are now complete. Upgrading to 4G LTE in China has also been largely completed and 5G won’t arrive until 2020. Therefore, the forecast for 2018 and beyond is a little more modest, as accelerated growth will calm down a little.”
“As Chinese demand gradually drops, the global market will largely be sustained by fronthaul investments in the rest of the world, where developments will be different, more dependent on market forces. We see a lot of recent growth in fibre for Data Centres and Cloud applications which will continue in the near future.”