“It will be interesting to see the split between fiber and fixed wireless technologies used to support these unserved areas, as Charter has been committed to both technologies,” said Dell’Oro Group’s Jeff Heynen, vice president for broadband access and home networking, in a Monday morning email to FierceTelecom. “In general, we are expecting to see an uptick this year in cable remote OLT deployments for FTTH this year and next, as part of both greenfield and overbuild scenarios. We assume some of these deployments will be for RDOF-related projects, such as Charter’s.”

Delays that have long beset IoT, and machine-to-machine (M2M) frameworks that preceded it, are still apparent but not as significant as they were a few years ago, explained Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro Group. “While some might have expected this to be larger by now, the reality is that IoT revenues are still growing at a faster pace than non-IoT revenues and remain on track to account for 5% of operators’ wireless revenues by 2025, up from 1% to 2% in 2019,” he wrote in response to questions.

The radio access network (RAN) market is, thanks in large part to operators’ 5G investments, growing faster than it has in about a decade, according to Dell’Oro Group. Global RAN revenues neared $35 billion in 2020 and were closer to $31 billion in 2010, Stefan Pongratz, VP at the market research firm, told SDxCentral.

China had concerns that the Acacia deal could put its own technology suppliers in an unfavourable position. Acacia, which was a Cisco partner before the merger proposal, provides a technology called coherent optical solutions designed to improve performance of telecoms networks. It is one of the few suppliers that can deliver optical wavelength speeds as high as 600 Gbps, so buying Acacia is a critical component in Cisco’s long term technology strategy, according Jimmy Yu, vice-president and industry analyst at Dell’Oro Group.