DSL port shipments up in Q1

Global DSL port shipments jumped 6 percent to more than 15.1 million in the first quarter of 2005, according to newly released research from broadbandtrends.com.

As expected, Alcatel maintained its No. 1 market share spot with 3.9 million ports shipped, good for a 25.8% market share. However, Huawei had its best quarter ever, according to the study, shipping 2.75 million ports and accounting for an 18.1% market share. Huawei, which was followed by Siemens, Lucent and ECI Telecom in the list, was helped significantly by its European and Middle Eastern business, said Teresa Mastrangelo, Principal Analyst at broadbandtrends.com.

“Their European business is growing fast,” she said. “Their business in the Asia-Pac region is kind of flat, but the big jump was in Europe.”

Alcatel, which said in its first-quarter earnings call that overall revenue was hurt by lackluster wireline sales, saw its shipments to the Asia-Pac region fall substantially, Mastrangelo said. However, given the company’s dominance in the U.S. market, its overall market share is not dropping significantly.

Also included in this quarter’s report was Multi-Service Access Platforms and Broadband Loop Carriers, which combined contributed 12 percent to overall DSL port shipments.

In a separate announcement, Zhone Technologies said that according to broadbandtrends.com, it holds the No. 1 market share position for BLCs. In the first quarter, the company became the first to ship 100,000 DSL ports via its BLC products.

In the U.S., the BLC/MSAP model has been adopted largely by independent telcos and CLECs migrating away from UNE-P platforms, but may migrate to larger carriers soon, Mastrangelo said.

“The RBOCs are the great unknown,” she said. “I think we’re going to see those products in RBOCs--the question is the timing. We have to wait to see what happens with the fiber-to-the-node deployments.”