A new industry e-commerce report says that the global ISP equipment market
will triple or even quadruple by 2003 when a third of all residential users
are choosing high-speed access.
According to Datamonitor’s “Powering the Internet
Revolution: 1999-2003” report, the combined number of residential broadband
subscribers (cable and ADSL devices) reached 700,000 globally in 1998.
The opportunity for vendors of networking hardware and software within the
ISP sector will boom. Fueled by the increasing size of their customer bases
and a rise in demand for richer service portfolios, the total market will
grow to $5.8 billion by 2003, said the report.
The primary driver for growth among network equipment will be greater
bandwidth consumption per ISP subscriber. ISPs will also spend heavily on
hardware and software that support their evolving suites of products and
services. The market for ISP service equipment will more than quadruple in
size between 1998 and 2003, reaching a value of $6.2 billion in 2003, the
report says The total market for ISP equipment will approach $15 billion in
2003.
Datamonitor technology analyst Zach Kaiman said this shift to broadband will
benefit a variety of companies.
“We see many companies well- positioned to
take advantage of this trend including key players such as Cisco, Qwest,
Lucent, Nortel, HP, IBM, as well as content specialists like AOL,
Excite@home, Yahoo! and RealNetworks,” he said.
Datamonitor forecasts Internet accounts (already 95 million this year) will
increase more than fivefold over the next five years. By 2003, there will be
nearly 545 million Internet user accounts globally, surpassing the number of
PCs installed globally.
Datamonitor is a market analysis firm that specializes in the technology,
financial services, consumer goods, healthcare, medical equipment, energy,
and automotive industries.
