Shipments of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) ports jumped 22 percent to almost 2.7 million ports in the second quarter 2008, a 56 percent year-over-year increase. By the end of the year, FTTH port shipments should reach 11.6 million ports shipped in 2008, a little higher than the 11.5 million ports originally forecast at the start of year by Dittberner Associates.

 

NTT and KDDI added almost a million subscribers during the quarter, representing more than half of all new FTTH subscribers. This allowed Mitsubishi (News - Alert) and Sumitomo to grow their market shares, Dittberner said.

 

Sumitomo reclaimed second place from Tellabs (News - Alert), both because of the strong growth in Japan and because of Verizon's transition away from Tellabs' BPON products, Dittberner said. Alcatel-Lucent, now Verizon's main GPON supplier, and Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens, the main supplier of GePON equipment to Korea Telecom, rounded out the top five spots, the firm said. 
 

Japan, with 7.6  million homes and 2.25 million apartments connected with fiber, has the world's largest installed base of FTTH subscribers. Japan's strong growth propelled GePON's  increase in market share to 62 percent, while BPON and GPON both decreased.

 

Point-to-point Ethernet saw strong growth and combined central office and customer premises equipment (CPE) ports shipped exceeded both BPON and GPON port shipments. Cisco (News - Alert) is the leader in point-to-point Ethernet, while Ericsson, PacketFront and Iskratel also are among segment leaders.