Telecom Lead America: Reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) optical network equipment market and the wavelength selective switch (WSS) components market reported significant dip in growth in the first half of the current year.
Infonetics Research said unit shipment declines coupled with price reductions caused ROADM WSS component revenue to fall 34 percent in the first half of 2012 (1H12) from the first half of 2011 (1H11).
ROADM WSS component revenue as a share of WDM ROADM equipment has fallen to a 5-year low of 6 percent.
No single vendor controls the WDM ROADM optical network equipment market.
Infonetics forecasts the ROADM WSS component market to grow at a 9.5 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2011 to 2016.
Component growth will benefit from the rollout of new greenfield coherent 100G networks in 2014, particularly gridless ROADMs designed to support colorless, directionless, contentionless (CDC) architectures.
“Growth in the overall WDM ROADM equipment market hasn’t been stellar, but it has far outstripped the declines seen in ROADM WSS units and revenue,” said Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics Research. “I think we have learned that the WSS market is more cyclical and tied to the ebb and flow of common equipment deployments.”
