DSL Continues to Dominate the Broadband Access Market

DSL continues to dominate the broadband access market

Since 2004, the Asia Pacific region (APAC) has become the main market for broadband access, and the main market growth also comes from this region. In 2008, the global broadband market was about 250 million lines, and APAC broadband users accounted for 40% of the total global users, most of which used ADSL technology, and most of them used ADSL Technology in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa); In NAFTA, half of the users use ADSL and half of the users use cable modem.

Based on the economy of PON network, it was once considered as the best technology to solve the bottleneck of last mile. In 2008, the number of PON users of APAC will reach 14.5 million, most of which will still come from South Korea and Japan, but the main growth in the future will come from China, while Europe and the United States will perform mediocrely in terms of PON deployment.

According to the report released by infonetics reseach, a communication network market research organization, in June 2008, the overall PON market in the world fell and the growth slowed down. At the same time, considering the high cost of optical fiber deployment, access methods such as FTTB, fttn and FTTC can integrate DSL technology to provide broadband access services. At the same time, in China, we note that China Telecom's EPON network equipment will also support FTTB DSL networking. Its application is mainly for occasions with sufficient copper wire resources such as commercial buildings.

On the contrary, with the development of new ADSL2 and VDSL standards, DSL technology has made good progress in the past few years. The increase of various business traffic and the pursuit of high bandwidth make users interested in these new technologies, and operators are also interested in these new technologies, especially ADSL2 , because the cost of upgrading from the old ADSL network to ADSL2 is very low. Therefore, DSL technology will still dominate the global broadband access market in the next few years. In China's broadband access market, DSL and EPON are bound to coexist for a long time.

Global access network semiconductor market (in millions of dollars, Gartner Dataquest data June 2007)

Structural changes in access network semiconductor industry

In recent years, in the broadband global access network semiconductor market with a market size of more than US $2 billion, the income of the global access network semiconductor industry in DSL access and T1 / E1 market commonly used for mobile base stations has been relatively stable, and even declined in the European market; In the traditional PSTN line card market, semiconductor revenue is also declining year by year.

The recession of the market has had a great impact on the whole broadband access semiconductor industry. In the past two years, there has been a continuous trend of mergers and acquisitions in the broadband access semiconductor industry. Infineon, a semiconductor market giant, ranks first in the overall broadband access market. It also consolidated its market share by acquiring ti's DSL CPE business. In addition, Zarlink acquired legerity and Ikanos acquired the DSL business of Centillium. Keshengxun even received a delisting warning from the Nasdaq stock market at the beginning of the year.

In July 2008, Erwin ysewijn of Infineon Technology Taiwan said at the bbwf forum in Hong Kong that with the slowdown of market growth, access network semiconductor suppliers can survive only by improving their scale and market share, and with the increasingly fierce market competition, only 2-3 semiconductor suppliers may survive in the access network semiconductor market.

According to the data provided by Gartner Dataquest in 2007, Infineon has an overall market share of 20%, while it ranks second in the ADSL market. Yang Erwen pointed out that Infineon consolidated its advantages in the DSL market with a market size of about US $1.1 billion by acquiring Ti DSL CPE business last year. At present, Infineon accounts for about 34% of the overall broadband access network market share.

Erwin ysewijn, vice president of marketing of Infineon Taiwan's fixed network access business department

Broadband value added services (bvas) look forward to taking off

Among the global access network business profits of about US $9.1 billion, the bvas market accounts for us $2 billion, of which VoIP contributes 21%, which also makes the VoIP based semiconductor market still grow greatly under the condition that the overall broadband access market is flat; European VoIP operators have tasted the "first taste" of VoIP, while NAFTA still focuses on data services, and its current VoIP is mainly based on ATA (analog telephone adapter) scheme.

And since Yahoo BB has provided ADSL broadband IP value-added services to Japan, Taiwan will also become popular in mainland China, Chinese mainland, India and other places. According to Yang Erwen, Infineon's cordless telephone chip integrating DECT 6.0/cat IQ standard can optimize VoIP call quality, improve the functions of base station, mobile phone and VoIP channel, and support Infineon's dual channel duslic XT equipment.

At present, although the uplink rate of ADSL2 technology is still low compared with the downlink rate, today's main video services are still based on ADSL2 technology. Yang Erwen believes that DSL technology can fundamentally select different optimized protection combinations for different services, so it can provide low latency and jitter for VoIP, games and other services, and DSL traffic identification also allows IPTV streams to have high delay.

At the bbwf forum in Hong Kong, Infineon also launched a combination of ADSL2 and VDSL2 solutions for CPE, including transceivers, routers, VoIP, ISDN and related software, which can optimize IPTV and other applications. In addition, Yang Erwen stressed that many operators have focused on investing in IPTV business based on DSL technology. He believes that IPTV will make a breakthrough in 2009.