40G QSFP Product Sales To Triple This Year

“2012 likely was the peak year for 40G WDM, but Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP)-based enterprise applications are ramping nicely,” comments Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst/Optical at Infonetics Research. “100G optical transceivers arrived in force in 2012, with virtually every vendor fielding a solution. Though the market is nascent and the growth rate will slow, coherent 100G shipments are on track to more than double in 2013 and again in 2014.” Shipments of 40G QSFP long- and short-reach modules are forecast by Infonetics to triple this year, while tunable XFP shipments more than doubled last year, though at the expense of falling prices. However, the group believes tunable XFPs are the big growth opportunity, with unit shipments expected to grow at a 36-percent CAGR from 2012 to 2017, driven by the continued strength of the 10G metro market.