FTTx helps drive transmission module market

The market for telecomms and datacomms transmission modules is predicted to reach US $13.4 billion by 2012.

According to a new report from CIR, the market for telecommunications and datacomms transmission modules will reach US $13.4 billion by 2012.

The report is the next in a series from CIR that examines market and technology trends and opportunities in the optical communications sector.

Several factors are driving the transmission modules market.

The network is becoming increasingly fibrised with widespread deployment of 10 GigE, traditional copper infrastructure being abandoned in the data centre with Fibre Channel (at 4Gbit/s and above) and parallel optics assuming a growing role and PON architecture at last bringing fibre to the home.

In the 10 GigE sector, replacing Xenpak, X2 and XPAK with XFP (including XFP-E) and SFP+ presents numerous opportunities, especially since the boundaries between these two emerging MSAs have yet to be defined.

CIR believes that the market for SFP+ and XFP transceivers will reach $1.0 billion and $0.9 billion respectively by 2012.

Technological innovations are also creating new opportunities in the 10 GigE sector.

Electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) has helped create an entirely new serial 10 GigE standard called LRM with broad range of applications.

And 10GBase-T capitalises on new forms of copper cabling and signal processing to extend the reach of copper networks.

10GBase-T alone should clock up $724 million in revenues in 2012 Fibre Channel is very much in the ascendant with higher datarates (4Gbit/s and soon 8Gbit/s) at the start of their growth curve.

There is also the possibility that Fibre Channel will break out from the SAN market and find applications in mainframe-to-mainframe interconnection and in grid computing.

CIR expects that the total value for Fibre Channel modules in 2012 will amount to $747 million.

WDM is being spurred by growing bandwidth demands, the opportunity to eliminate costly OEO conversions and the availability of more flexible bandwidth management in WDM equipment.

In this sector, many of the opportunities have to do with tunability, a technique whose capabilities have yet to be fully explored.

At the module level this translates into demand for more tunable modules (especially pluggable ones) and the ability to bring cost points down to where tunables can be used more widely in metro (and perhaps even in access) networks.

According to CIR WDM modules should reach $2.2 billion by 2012.

CIR's new transmission modules report analyses and quantifies all of the key market opportunities in the transceiver and transponder modules business through 2012.

It covers Ethernet, Fibre Channel, parallel optics, PONs, Sonet/SDH and WDM and addresses the impact of new signal processing technology (including EDC), optical integration/silicon photonics, and other emerging technologies on the module market.

Detailed volume and value forecasts are provided for each protocol covered broken out by datarates, MSA, technology platform, reach etc.

The report also provides an analysis of current strategies of key players in the optical modules space.

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