Optical transceiver market to grow 50 percent by?2017

The optical transceiver market will grow to US $5.1bn in 2017. Stronger traffic growth could have a significant positive effect on transceiver market growth. The global optical transceiver market will grow strongly over the next five year to $5.1bn in 2017, from $3.4bn in 2012.

Optical transceivers

The optical transceiver market saw price declines as high as 30 percent last year. These were not new products ramping in volume where sharp price declines are to be expected. Last year also saw fierce competition among the service providers while the steepest price declines were experienced by the telecom equipment makers. One optical transceiver sector that performed well last year is high-speed optical transceivers and in particular Ethernet.

The 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) market saw revenue growth due to strong demand for the 100GBASE-LR4 10km transceiver even though its unit price declined 30 percent. This is a sector the Chinese optical transceiver players are eyeing as they look to broaden the markets they address.

10Gtek expects the steady growth of 40GbE to continue; 40GbE transceivers use 10 Gig technology co-packaged into one module, offer improved port density and have a lower power and cost compared to four 10GbE transceivers.

Even the veteran 10GbE market continues to grow. Some 7-8M 10GbE short reach and long reach units were sold in 2012 growing to 10M units this year.

Meanwhile, the 100 Gigabit coherent long-haul transponder market was small in 2012. The optical vendors only started selling in volume last year and most of the system vendors manufacture their own 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) designs using discrete components. 10Gtek expects the 100Gbps coherent transponder market will grow in 2013 as system vendors embrace more third-party 100 Gig transponders. Other markets that grew in 2012 include optical access. The fibre-to-the-x (FTTx) continues to grow in terms of units shipped, with transceivers and board optical sub-assembly (BOSA) designs sharing the volumes. 10Gtek says that the number of optical network units (ONU) exceeded by more than double the number of FTTx subscribers added in 2012: 35-40M ONU transceivers and BOSAs compared to 15M new subscribers.

The result was a market value of $700M in 2012 compared to $300M in 2009. But because of the excess in shipments compared to new subscribers, 10Gtek expects the FTTx market to slow down.