Market research firm Infonetics Researchhas releasedits fourth quarter Broadband CPE and Subscribers market forecast report.

According to Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband and video at Infonetics Research, now that many major cable operators worldwide are aggressively putting into place the infrastructure to support wideband and DOCSIS 3.0 services, the market is now seeing more consistent quarterly shipments of wideband customer-premise equipment.

“It started with modems earlier in 2009 and now includes both gateways and embedded multimedia terminal adapters,” Heynen said. “Though the numbers remain small relative to standard cable CPE, we expect wideband cable devices to ramp up quickly in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, nearing $3 billion worldwide by 2014.”

The broadband CPE market highlights include: worldwide revenue from broadband CPE grew 10 percent in 4Q09 from 3Q09 to $1.1 billion; quarterly growth was driven by 3 main factors, operators flushed their year-end CPE and broadband budgets , consumers upgraded to new devices over the holidays, and chinese operators continued spending on ADSL CPE to support higher speeds as part of their fiber-to-the-building rollouts; for the full 2009 year, the worldwide broadband CPE market totaled $4.2 billion, down 8 percent from 2008; and technicolor regained the lead from Huawei (News - Alert)for overall broadband CPE revenue in 4Q09.

Infonetics’ quarterly broadband CPE report provides worldwide and regional market size, vendor market share, analysis, and forecasts for DSL and cable broadband customer-premise equipment and subscribers, voice CPE, residential gateways, and voice terminal adapters.

The firm released another research, Cable broadband equipment up 22 percent in 4Q09. Also released was the fourth quarter edition of itsCMTS and Edge QAM Hardware and Subscribersreport.

“True to form, operators in North America, particularly in the US, spent what was left of their equipment budgets in the fourth quarter of 2009, giving a year-end boost to CMTS and edge QAM vendors. Comcast, Time Warner, Cox (News - Alert), and Charter all acquired more downstream capacity by adding more CMTS ports, and Time Warner Cable continued its major upgrade to switched digital video, which helped bolster edge QAM revenue,” Heynen said.

Anamika Singh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anamika's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan