The increase was due to a strong showing in the North American and Japanese markets, with Korea�s shipments down slightly.
The dominant Japanese market continues to move toward a higher percentage of MDU subscribers, increasing the number of VDSL ports while reducing the number of FTTH ports. NTT, the dominant service provider in Japan, added about 423,000 FTTH customers. Verizon had comparable growth, adding 227,000 FTTH customers.
Rapid growth outside of Japan is seen in the market shares. The top three Japanese suppliers only account for 56% of the shipments, down from 78% a year ago. Tellabs benefited from the accelerating FTTH roll-outs by Verizon, but the report notes that this will be temporary since Verizon is in the process of switching to GPON technology from Alcatel-Lucent.
GEPON is still the dominant technology at 67% of ports shipped. GPON will grow as Verizon switches over and shipments in Western Europe pick up later this year.
According to Dittberner, 2007 will be a record year for FTTH shipments. However, the high cost of deployment and lack of new high-revenue services will keep FTTH from challenging DSL as the lead broadband technology. North America has not given any indication that FTTH is attractive enough to launch another initiative like Verizon�s, but this may change as the cable operators begin to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 networks.