"We've seen tremendous growth in the PON market over the past several years largely due to the broadband market expansion in China," wrote Alam Tamboli, senior analyst at Dell'Oro. "Recently, however, we have begun to see strong growth in the EMEA and North American regions. While service providers in China continue to invest heavily in their broadband access networks, we have observed an interesting relative shift in spending from optical line terminals (OLTs, the equipment that sits in central offices) to optical network terminals (ONTs, the equipment that often sits at or near customer premises). We believe this signifies a transition from the PON infrastructure build-out stage, to achieving return on investment, as more customers make use of the high-capacity services that the fiber allows. In North America, we have started to see a pickup in PON spending as many service providers have begun to offer gigabit networks. These deployments remain relatively small compared to China for now, however."