August 5, 2004 Redwood City, CA -- In its latest report, market research firm Dell'Oro Group increased its forecast for the total optical transport equipment market by approximately 6%, predicting growth to $7.8 billion by 2008. Following three years of decline, Dell'Oro Group forecasts that metro applications of optical transport equipment will lead the optical market into a recovery. Sales into metro applications are expected to grow from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $4.9 billion in 2008.
"The majority of the growth in metro applications will occur in 2004 and 2005 as service providers focus on delivering new services, such as broadband and video to the residential market and Ethernet services to the enterprise market," reports Jimmy Yu, senior analyst of optical transport equipment at Dell'Oro Group. "DWDM Metro will be one of the principal mechanisms to deliver these high bandwidth services, and we are predicting 73% growth for the worldwide DWDM Metro market between 2003 and 2008. Reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers or ROADMs will enable service providers to use DWDM equipment in their metro infrastructure, since these products allow remote reconfiguration of DWDM networks," he adds.
According to the report, the SONET/SDH Multiservice and Optical Switch markets also exhibit strong growth potential, driven by the increased demand in metro applications. The report also reveals increased activity around DWDM ultra-long haul and 40-Gbit/sec port speeds. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.delloro.com.
