According to Ovum, the global fibre-to-the-x (FTTx) optical components revenue market is expected to be over $1 billion in 2015. In comparison, in 2014, the optical components market revenue stood at $953 million.

The revenues will be driven by high demand for passive optical network equipment including both optical line terminal (OLT) transceivers and optical network terminal (ONT) transceivers.

Further, the research firm states that the FTTx market will be boosted by higher FTTx network deployments by North American multiple system operators, Google fibre expansion plans, widespread fibre led network deployments in South and Central America and Africa. In addition, growing adoption of fibre to the premises and fibre to the home will also contribute to the growing FTTx optical components revenues.

Going forward, the total OLT transceivers are forecasted to grow at 19 per cent to 6.5 million in 2015. Meanwhile, next-generation OLT transceivers are forecasted to represent just over 12 per cent of the total OLT transceiver market in 2020, with 10G ethernet passive optical network (EPON) OLTs representing the largest segment within next-gen passive optical network (PON).The total ONT transceiver market is expected to increase by 18 per cent to exceed 71 million in 2015. Further, the next-generation ONT transceivers are forecast to represent just over 9 per cent of the total ONT transceiver market in 2020 with 10/1 and 10/10 EPON ONTs representing the largest segment within next-gen PON.

Ovum’s PON optical components’ forecast does not include large FTTx deployments in the heavily-populated countries - India, Brazil, and Indonesia.  Large deployments in these countries would provide a significant boost to the units forecast and consequently to revenues as would faster deployments of next-generation PON because the application service providers for the next-generation PON optics are higher than those for non-next-generation.

China is the single largest consumer of PON optics in the world and any slowdown would negatively impact the forecast. China’s newest operator entrant into FTTx market, China Mobile, is well positioned to deploy an FTTx network to bring existing mobile customers onto its new wireline broadband network, and offer additional services.