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Cable access market bounces back in Q3 Total spending on broadband access equipment reached $3.1 billion in Q3 2020, up 1% versus the year-ago period, thanks in part to a rebound in cable network spending along with sustained spending on PON equipment, according to Dell'Oro Group. Total cable access concentrator revenue jumped 6% to $280 million in Q3. That was driven by solid growth in converged cable access platform (CCAP) license purchases across multiple regions – North America, Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) – Dell'Oro said.
Cable access spending appears to be picking up amid another rise in peak usage on US cable networks in recent months, according to NCTA's COVID-19 dashboard.
Click here for a larger version of this chart. By comparison, total cable access concentrator revenues (a category that includes DOCSIS infrastructure elements such as CCAP cores and chassis, virtual CCAP licensing and distributed access architecture (DAA) nodes and modules) dipped 8% to $219 million in Q3, due largely to a slowdown in CCAP license purchases. As a side note, cable infrastructure and consumer premises equipment (CPE) spending leapt past the $1 billion mark for the first time in Q3 since 2018, Dell'Oro said. 2020 has been a roller coaster ride for several cable access network vendors. During the early stages of the pandemic, cable operators put some next-gen network projects on the backburner so they could instead concentrate on beefing up capacity on their legacy platforms to stay ahead of a rise in upstream and downstream data demand as millions worked and schooled from home. According to the NCTA's COVID-19 Dashboard, which tabulates network traffic from several major US cable operators, downstream peak growth has risen 27.4% since March 2020 while upstream peak growth has surged 46.9% during that same timeframe.
Downstream traffic on US cable networks is surging again, according to NCTA data.
Click here for a larger version of this chart. Dell'Oro noted that the small rise in overall broadband access equipment revenues in Q3 was also due to "sustained spending" on PON gear. "The COVID-19 pandemic continues to accelerate operators' fiber and cable capacity expansions," Jeff Heynen, VP, broadband access and home networking, said in a statement. The net result, he added, has been a faster transition to premium 1Gbit/s residential services. Other recent numbers reflect that finding. Altice USA, for example, said that 29% of all gross broadband subscriber adds in Q3 (for customers on FTTP and HFC networks) took the company's 1-Gig service in areas where it's available. That 1-Gig sell-in rate jumped to 60% in Altice USA's growing FTTP footprint. Meanwhile, OpenVault's Q3 2020 study saw a 124% rise in the number of broadband customers provisioned for gigabit speeds – to 5.6% of total subs. — Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading, special to Broadband World News |
Charter has sparked RDOF work in all 24 states where it won bids. The cable op booked about $19 million in RDOF revenues in Q1, and expects to have about $9 million per month come in over the next ten years.
Launch of 2-Gig and 5-Gig FTTP tiers in 70-plus markets puts more pressure on cable ops to enhance their existing DOCSIS 3.1 network or accelerate their upgrade activity centered on the new DOCSIS 4.0 specs.
Ziply Fiber, an operator that tangles with Comcast and Charter, has launched two multi-gigabit tiers in 60 urban areas, aiming for all markets by Q2 2022.
Elon Musk's nascent broadband will need to radically accelerate the rate of satellite launches – and navigate tricky supply chain logistics – if it's going to come close to fulfilling its global ambition.
MoffettNathanson questions whether mobile operators will have the network capacity and the right business metrics to back their aggressive stance and forecasts for fixed wireless home broadband.
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