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| Telco Supplier Reality: With Capex Down, a Tough Market |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
| Wednesday, 02 November 2011 01:32 |
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“Growth Still A Challenge” Nikos Theodosopoulos writes about Tellabs, but he could be writing about almost any supplier to telcos or cablecos. The total market is limited by the carriers cutting investment. Nearly all suppliers will be flat to down for the foreseeable future. Even being just slightly down is doing well on the wireline side, where so many carriers are dis-investing.
High expectations hit particularly hard at Calix, down 20% in a day when sales disappointed and 60% in three months. Actually, Calix is doing fairly well, sweeping most of the contracts in the U.S. independents. They lost a large contract to Adtran when Adtran cut the price so low it noticeably reduced overall corporate margins, but are winning far more than they are losing. Now it’s been announced, I can report that Calix was the winner for gigabit CPE at Vermont Tel where I’ve done some consulting. Because it was part of a $100M stimulus project, the Vermont contract was intensely contested. A careful staff review decided Calix was their best choice. Calix had provided good support to VTEL in the past and has a good reputation for support among independent carriers. They have a substantial engineering department that can modify equipment for the customer’s needs.
Europe is currently far ahead of the U.S. in gateway capability. Among other thing, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom now provide high definition voice and 3x3 high-speed MIMO 802.11n in standard gateways. Calix assured me that if VTEL wanted that capability they could design it. |