- Fiber rollouts will keep moving, but BEAD revenue won’t come quickly for access vendors
- Operators will focus on experience more than subscriber count and speeds, said Calix
- Cable gear spend will likely pick up after a 2025 slump
2026 is poised to be a busy year for broadband access vendors, but not necessarily due to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.
Although NTIA is finally allowing states to put their BEAD plans in motion, it’ll take a while longer before equipment vendors profit from those projects, said Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen.
“When it comes to BEAD, I now think we won’t see as much flow-through to the equipment vendors this year, as that gets pushed to 2027,” he told Fierce.
The good news? Large and small operators will continue deploying fiber and turning up subscribers, which will in turn drive up purchases of both XGS-PON optical line terminals (OLTs) and optical networking terminals (ONTs), said Heynen.
Fiber broadband, particularly privately funded builds, will remain a driving force for access vendors.
“Strong public and, more importantly, private funding for fiber deployments to homes, businesses and 5G sites remains the primary driver of growth for the broadband access market,” said Adtran Head of Marketing Stephan Rettenberger.
While Adtran is headquartered in the U.S., he noted the company has “a second set of strong roots in Europe” and is also eyeing opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly Australia and New Zealand.
“Based on data from industry analysts blended with our own estimates, we expect fiber broadband in our markets to have a CAGR of approximately 6.8% through 2028,” Rettenberger added.
“Private money will still drive a lot of the work early on,” he said, partly because investors want to get ahead of rising costs and labor shortages that will likely show up by the end of the year.
As for BEAD, “Some early projects will break ground, but most of the year will be about design, laying the groundwork for the bigger builds that will hit in 2027,” Bartz said.
What’s next for PON?
Operators are pushing to reach 20 Gbps and beyond on their networks, but XGS-PON will likely be the “workhorse and cost-optimized solution” for the next five years or so, said Alan DiCicco, Calix VP of Solution and Product Marketing.
Calix is helping operators like ALLO and Brightspeed test 50G-PON, however it’s not just about obtaining 50-gig speeds, DiCicco said. Platform integration is key as telcos think about how to “combine discrete yet similar networks into one infrastructure.”
“The investment is in the platform, the ability to be able to say, I have this network, I’m just going to plug in a new card and it runs at 50-gig,” he said.
As the U.S. now boasts nearly 100 million fiber-to-the-home passings, DiCicco thinks it’s time operators stop focusing so much on their connection count. He predicts 2026 will be the year they shift into “communications experience” providers as they fine-tune AI operations.
Cable spend on the upswing
Despite a 2025 slump for cable equipment, spend on Remote-PHY devices, remote OLTs and virtual cable modem termination systems (vCMTS) is expected to pick up this year alongside DOCSIS 3.1 and 4.0 upgrades, said Heynen.
He added Low Latency DOCSIS, an approach that aims to reduce round-trip network latency to sub-5 milliseconds, “will drive additional software licensing spending, particularly on vCMTS platforms.” Comcast is one operator that’s said it rolled out low latency tech for applications like gaming and video.
“Also within the cable segment, I expect CPE unit volumes to increase as operators begin to ramp up purchases of new devices that can take advantage of the additional throughput, whether full DOCSIS 4.0 or DOCSIS 3.1 Plus,” Heynen said. “These units will be able to support Low Latency DOCSIS and have more remote diagnostic and monitoring capabilities.”