DSL port shipments hit record levels in the second quarter of 2005, as Asian and European carriers brought higher speeds and more advanced services to their customers, according to broadbandtrends.com. Global port shipments exceeded 19 million, driven primarily by upgrades to ADSL 2+ and Ethernet platforms designed to offer IPTV, said Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst with broadbandtrends.com.

Alcatel was the big winner, as the company saw quarterly growth in ports shipped and retained its market leadership at 31% share. “This was the biggest quarter ever for Alcatel,” said Mastrangelo. “They are clearly winning additional business with a number of new accounts, but they are also benefit from a lot of upgrade activity on the existing base.” Most of that upgrade activity involves moving from ADSL to ADSL 2+ and moving from ATM-based DSLAMs to Ethernet-based DSLAMs, she said. Asian DSL growth hit its highest mark in two years, and grew 35% over the previous quarter while the Europe/Middle East/Africa segment grew 24% to nearly nine million ports, according to Mastrangelo.

“This was by no means a bad quarter for North America where shipments grew on strong numbers for the first quarter, but we expect to see the real bump in North America in the second half of this year, where we’ll see the IP DSLAMs and fiber-to-the-node deployments.”

Alcatel retained its global leadership position with a 31% share of the market. Chinese vendor Huawei grew by 20% for the quarter and holds 17% of the market, followed by Siemens (8%), Lucent (7%) and ZTE (6%). The remaining 31% of the market was divided among 16 other companies.

“The DSLAM market continues to show continuing growth opportunities as operators aggressively upgrade and replace equipment to offer consumers higher bandwidth and triple-play services,” said Mastrangelo. “Operators are clearly making the transition to ADSL2+ and Ethernet-based platforms as they begin to offer newer IP services such as IP-TV.”