A new Heavy Reading report shows that worldwide shipments of cable data and voice modems jumped 19.5% in the first half of 2007 compared to the first half of 2006. Talk about fueling the broadband economy. Total shipments hit a record of 16.4 million.
Motorola has long been the global leader in cable modem sales, and currently has 38% market share compared to the next leading competitor (Cisco’s Scientific Atlanta) with 20.5%. (More market share details in the report) In addition to high-performing technology, that level of market share comes from having the manufacturing capacity to produce more than 20,000 modems per day.
Of course the market is shifting constantly, and competition is far from scarce. One thing the numbers don’t tell is how modems are evolving. In addition to breaking down shipments by voice and data modems, it’s interesting to look at how the devices are changing the way broadband is delivered, and how all suppliers are having to innovate to keep up.
The latest modems on the market are designed to support DOCSIS 3.0 and specifically channel-bonding technology. While nothing has been certified for DOCSIS 3.0 by CableLabs yet, there have been plenty of field tests of pre-DOCSIS 3.0 devices. Motorola’s SB6100 modems were the first to be deployed in a commercial channel-bonding implementation and currently are used in both Singapore and Korea. In customer tests, the modems have yielded 138 Mbps with Euro-DOCSIS channel bonding. Next month, Motorola will submit the new SB6120 modem in CableLabs’ Certification Wave 56 for official DOCSIS 3.0 certification. Wonder what the new DOCSIS 3.0 modems will do to next year’s shipment numbers.
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