Ciena isn’t the only optical vendor feeling the aftershocks of the pandemic. A Dell’Oro Group report out this week found that growth in the optical transport equipment market slowed to 1%, reaching total revenues of $16 billion in 2020.

Jeff Heynen, vice presidents of broadband access and home networking at Dell’Oro Group, agrees that the deal makes strategic sense because it keeps Vecima focused on all aspects of DAA while keeping ATX centered on the parts of the outside plant it’s targeting for next-gen HFC networks, namely amplifiers, passives and taps. “If they’re going to address the outside plant at the node, that’s obviously where Vecima believes their sweet spot is going to be,” Heynen said.

Dave Bolan, research director at Dell’Oro Group, said the flexibility of Nokia’s DelOps effectively extends the reach of operators’ existing network software configurations and reduces complexity. “CI/CD is evolving from a one-solution-for-all in a homogenous environment to multiple solutions for different operators, whether they operate in a public, private, or hybrid cloud,” Bolan wrote in response to questions. “This enables a streamlined introduction of new features and services in a complex telco environment with multiple domains, third-party software, and hybrid-cloud environments, which took longer and was more arduous before.”

The RAN market also surprised on the upside in Europe, with revenues increasing at the fastest pace in seven years across the continent, he said. “We attribute the stronger-than-expected results to a confluence of factors,” he told Fierce. “First and foremost, we underestimated the magnitude and depth of the 5G rollouts, including both sub-6 GHz wide-band and narrow-band 5G.”