A new five-year forecast by Dell’Oro Group predicts increased sales of GPON optical line terminals (OLTs), DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS and VDSL infrastructure equipment through 2016. Driven by growing bandwidth requirements, the report say that GPON will show the fastest growth, followed by CMTS and VDSL, offsetting a trend of declining revenue for slower-speed ADSL equipment.

“Our forecast for GPON growth is driven by deployment in China as well as increasing projects in other global regions,” says Steve Nozik, principal analyst of access research at Dell’Oro Group. “For CMTS, growth will be driven by rapidly increasing Internet traffic, competition with telecom service providers, and an increasing focus on the small and medium-sized business market among cable operators as well as a migration to IP video service.”

The report also expects DOCSIS to continue as the primary cable broadband technology for at least the next five years due to additional channel bonding being used to meet increasing bandwidth needs. VDSL growth will be driven by its higher bandwidth capabilities in association with emerging vectoring technology aimed at extending the life of copper infrastructures by eliminating crosstalk.