While down sequentially, Huawei strengthened its leadership position in the optical hardware market, with
global revenue up 23 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.

The global optical network equipment market, including WDM and SDH/SONET
equipment, dropped 4 percent sequentially in Q3 2011, from $3.5 billion to $3.4
billion, on the heels of a 12 percent increase in Q2 2011.

Networking giant Cisco posted a big sequential gain in optical equipment revenue (+46 percent), as did
the vendors who sell into Japan, and WDM equipment sales were up in North
America, but outside of this, Q3 was not a strong quarter for the optical
network hardware market.

“A sign of a capex slowdown is when purchases of advanced equipment (WDM)
decline and legacy equipment (SDH) increase. This happened in the EMEA region
(namely Europe), but not in North America. This is a key trend to watch for in
Q4 2011; if continued in EMEA this would be a strong negative leading
indicator,” said Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst for optical for Infonetics
Research.

Rolling 12-month spending averages remain positive (despite the uptrend line
being broken this quarter), and year-over year, from Q3 2010 to Q3 2011, the
overall optical network equipment market is up 5 percent.
The bright spot of the quarter is WDM optical network equipment, global revenue
for which is up 18 percent year-over-year.

ROADM network equipment spending set a new high in Q3 2011, up 4 percent
sequentially, and shipments are up a stunning 43 percent for January through
September 2011 compared to the same 9-month period last year.

North America posted modest quarter-over-quarter gains with good performances
by Cisco, Nokia Siemens Networks, and ADVA.
Performance in Asia was a mixed bag with good results in Japan but relatively
weak results in China for the overall optical market.

Recently,
Infonetics said that Ciena tops the list of vendors service providers consider
to be leaders in 40G and 100G optical technology, next gen packet-optical
transport systems (P-OTS), and overall optical transmission and switching.

Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Infinera, and Nokia Siemens Networks also received high
marks from service providers in all three areas: optical transmission and switching,
40G/100G, and next gen P-OTS.
Infinera and Nokia Siemens Networks are the only vendors being evaluated for
future optical purchases by a larger number of customers than have them
currently installed.

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]