Oct 11, 2006 12:34 PM,

Report: Adtran wins AT&T’s wireless backhaul business

By Ed Gubbins

Adtran may have turned an anchor into a sail, winning a multimillion-dollar deal to supply AT&T with optical products that dragged down the vendor’s revenue expectations earlier this year.

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According to Morgan Keegan analyst Simon Leopold, Adtran has won a bid to supply AT&T with its 6100 line of OC-3/OC-12 Sonet multiplexers. The deal may be worth $40 million to $50 million, or almost 10% of what Leopold expects Adtran’s total revenue to be this year.

AT&T is expected to use the 6100s--along with Flashwave 4100s from its incumbent vendor, Fujistu Network Communications--for wireless backhaul, transporting traffic from wireless base stations to switching centers.

“While we previously suspected the market opportunity was small considering the volume of traffic per base station, it now seems material to ADTRAN,” Leopold wrote in a note issued today.

Later this year, Leopold expects AT&T to begin deploying the optical gear to 7% of its nearly 40,000 wireless base stations. Other wireless carriers should follow suit, replacing copper backhaul with optical as data applications drive network traffic higher. Over the next few years, Leopold estimates wireless carriers could look to upgrade half of the nation’s 200,000 base stations to optical, creating a $1.5 billion market for vendors such as Adtran and Fujitsu.

The sales outlook for the 6100 platform disappointed Adtran earlier this year. When the vendor lowered its 2006 revenue expectations for the second time in July (by roughly 9%), chief executive officer Thomas Stanton cited the 6100 line as a major factor. “The opportunities are still in front of us but haven’t delivered at this time,” Stanton said then. “A lot of people are cognizant of what they are, and a lot of it is around the 6100 product family.”

“All the major deals are intact, but we’re not planning on all those deals coming online this year,” he added at the time.

In his note today, Leopold predicted Adtran to report $94 million in optical systems revenue next year as the AT&T deployment ramps up. That number represents 91% growth over this year’s estimates for Adtran’s optical revenue.