OLT, ONT Sales Anticipated to Boom

OLT, ONT Sales Anticipated to Boom

Omdia’s latest forecasts for the fiber access equipment market predict OLT and ONT sales will reach $110 billion globally by 2029, despite revenue being lower than forecast in 2023. Of the $110 billion, North America will account for 35% of this spend overall, which is a little over $35 billion on OLT and ONT/ONU ports alone.

“The opportunity is [massive] in North America. It’s quickly going to become a huge share of global fiber access equipment revenue,” said Jaimie Lenderman, Research Manager and Principal Analyst, Broadband Access Intelligence Service, Omdia. “We did see a dip and adjusted our forecasts. This dip, as many know, was due to some operator inventory ingestion period, which was a leftover symptom of the pandemic.”

As North America’s market share is predicted to grow on the global stage over the next five years, increasing from 13.9% in 2023 to 39.3% in 2029, with the US overtaking China with the highest PON equipment revenue by 2026. The Middle East and Africa are also expected to pick up FTTH deployments, while Asia and Oceania (excluding China) are poised to grow to around 17% during the forecast period.

PON’s market share is expected to steadily increase through 2029, with 90% of ports shipped by then being 10G due to operators using the technology to future-proof connections and enabling more significant opportunities beyond residential deployments. Operators are applying PON to enterprise, smart cities, xHaul transportation, and W-iFi data aggregation uses.

“PON can support high bandwidth, low latency, as well as secure networking for a lot of different applications,” Lenderman said. “We are seeing PON for xHaul transport. It starts with backhaul. As you get up and future-proof with 10G and beyond, you are able to move into the mid-haul and, I would say more controversially, front-haul…. I do believe there are several markets where they’re planning to use 50G PON for that.”

Omdia expects a pick-up in network equipment sales in a year as BEAD funding is released and new operators begin to emerge. Lenderman recommends service providers need to establish vendor and ecosystem partnerships now and to think long-term about network planning and growth as they start to invest.

To learn more about OLT and ONT growth and how it could affect you as a service provider, listen to the latest Fiber for Breakfast.

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