DSLAM Market is Booming

The number of Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM) ports shipped almost doubled from 2002 to 2003, finds In-Stat/MDR. Also, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for 48 percent of all DSLAM port shipments in 2003.

This is attributed to: growth in DSL subscribers and addition of capacity for future expansion by service providers. 

However, the growth is likely to be slower next year, as the capacity would have been added and rate of DSL subscriber growth would slow down. Despite this, the port shipments would grow by about 40 percent. 

In-Stat/MDR has also found that: 

• The Average Selling Price (ASP) per DSLAM port, worldwide, dropped by over 30% in 2003, as vendors competed fiercely on price to win contracts. This price erosion will also continue in coming years, keeping revenue growth rates below those of port shipments. 
• Alcatel continued to be the dominant vendor of DSLAMs in all regions, except for the Asia-Pacific region (where they were the second-leading vendor). 
• New higher-bandwidth forms of DSL would replace standard ADSL. 
• IP DSLAMs are growing in popularity, and are widely deployed in the Asia-Pacific and CALA regions. They offer lower cost, gigabit Ethernet, trunking than ATM-based DSLAMs, and may also provide intelligent features, such as support of DiffServ classes of service and IGMP multicasting for video services. 
• The deployment of DSLAMs in remote locations is growing as service providers extend their DSL footprint to reach more subscribers. Another key driver for remote DSLAMs is the deployment of VDSL in Multiple Tenant Units (MTUs) in countries such as Japan and Korea.