The global broadband access market wasn't spared by the pandemic in the first quarter of 2020, as revenues in the sector dropped 15%, to $2.5 billion, versus the year-ago quarter, according to Dell'Oro Group.
The decline spilled into the cable access "concentrator" market, which includes DOCSIS infrastructure elements such as Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) cores and chassis, virtual CCAP licensing and distributed access architecture (DAA) nodes and modules. Revenues in that category declined 22%, to $211 million, driven by a slowdown in CCAP license purchases in North America, Dell'Oro said.
On the bright side, total shipments of DOCSIS 3.1 consumer premises equipment (CPE) rose to 5.8 million, representing 67% of total cable CPE shipments. That number is poised to reach 70% by the end of 2020, predicts Jeff Heynen, senior research director, broadband access and home networking at Dell'Oro.
He attributed the rise in D3.1 CPE in part to device deployments in support of newly upgraded DOCSIS 3.1 networks and from operators wanting to seed the market with D3.1 devices ahead of network upgrades.
Heynen also expects Q2 cable access revenues to rebound a bit in the second quarter as cable operators boost upstream capacity by purchasing additional channel capacity on traditional CCAPs and move ahead with mid-split and high-split projects that expand the amount of spectrum dedicated for the cable network upstream.
For more detail about Dell'Oro's Q1 2020 review, including what it saw in the fiber-to-the-premises market, please see this story on Light Reading: Global broadband access equipment revenues dip 15% in Q1 – Dell'Oro
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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading, special to Broadband World News
