Optical network hardware revenue — including SONET/SDH and WDM – posted flat growth year-on-year but rose 27 percent sequentially to $3.3 billion in Q2 2014, said Infonetics Research.

Sequential growth was due to strong seasonal performances from Huawei and ZTE in China in the Asia Pacific telecom market.

EMEA region observed weakening spending trends.

Worldwide WDM equipment revenue grew 6 percent year-over-year, said Infonetics Research.

Optical network investment trends

Incidentally, North American internet content providers (ICPs) such as Google could not lift investment in the optical network market in the second quarter.

Infonetics Research said North American ICPs such as Google and others generated optical spending at a handful of vendors including Adva, BTI, and Infinera, altogether accounting for an estimated $40 million surge in Q2.

“While the term ‘tier-1’ is traditionally associated with the incumbent operators of Europe and RBOCs in North America, it is now qualitatively clear that tier-1 spending growth is coming from the competitive dark fiber and internet exchange carriers,” said Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for carrier transport networking at Infonetics Research.

“These carriers, as well as vertically-integrated internet content providers (ICPs), provide a growing portion of core internet connectivity and intra-datacenter capacity,” Schmitt added.

The telecom analysis report said the first half of 2014 brought another flood of 100G WDM shipments by Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Huawei, and Infinera.

Ciena’s and Infinera’s North American optical revenue grew rapidly on a year-over-year basis in 2Q, while Fujitsu’s and Alcatel-Lucent’s decreased.

Baburajan K
[email protected]