Carrier Access today warned of “softness” in its fourth-quarter financial results as the company works to broaden and diversify its customer base.

The broadband access equipment vendor expects to report fourth-quarter revenue between $12.3 million and $12.5 million, which represents a 22% to 24% sequential decline and a 41% to 42% drop from a year earlier.

The company also expects a fourth-quarter net loss between $0.24 and $0.28 per share, down from a $0.02 positive net income a year earlier and a $0.16 loss in the third quarter. Excluding stock compensation expenses, the fourth-quarter loss is between $0.21 and $0.25 per share.

The company blamed the results on lower-than-expected orders from wireless carrier customers and original equipment manufacturer partners.

In a statement released today by the company, Carrier Access Chief Executive Officer Roger Koenig said he was “disappointed” in the revenue drop but that the “softness” seen in the quarter was “short-term.”

Koenig made similar remarks in October, when Carrier Access reported a 23% year-over-year drop in its third-quarter revenue (to about $16 million). At the time, the company attributed the problem to a single wireless carrier customer deferring certain projects to 2007. The results were “disappointing,” Koenig said then, but not indicative of any long-term trend.

Carrier Access is currently working to diversify its customer base, identifying too many eggs in too few baskets as one of its greatest risk factors. In the first nine months of last year, one customer contributed 42% of the company’s revenue, and a single distributor contributed 11% of total revenue (up from 8% the year before and 7% the year before that).

In November, the company named a new chief operating officer (COO): Allen Snyder, the former COO of Openwave Systems.