According to Technavio, the global optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) market is expected to post an incremental growth of $37.62 million during the period 2019-2023.
The increasing investments in smart city projects will be one of the major drivers in the global OTDR market, Technavio says. Around the globe, countries are focusing on the development of smart cities to manage assets and resources efficiently. Smart cities comprise public amenities and infrastructure connected through communication networks. Automobiles communicating with traffic lights or with the smartphones of pedestrians is an instance. This will require mobile networks such as 4G/5G, which can handle a massive amount of data. Moreover, a smart city will require extensive machine-type communication (MTC) applications. Such applications use very low data rates, but require extensive connectivity, which will necessitate the need for high-speed networks for faster data transmission and communication. Thus, the adoption of 4G/5G networks for smart city projects is expected to rise significantly, with subsequent increases in the need for optical fiber. These factors are expected to drive the demand for OTDRs during the forecast period.
Increasing investments in data centers are also expected to have a positive impact on the market and contribute to its growth over the forecast period.
A huge amount of data is generated owing to the development of smart cities, smart grids, and smart homes. The requirement of data centers has increased in order to monitor and process that data. That trend has led to an increase in investments in data centers, which is expected to be one of the critical trends in the global OTDR market. During the deployment of data centers, multiple variations of cables such as unshielded twisted-pair, coax, multi-mode or single-mode fibers, and hybrid active optical cables, are used. This increases the need for optical time domain reflectometers to test the optical fiber cables, which in turn, is expected to boost market growth during the forecast period.
"Apart from the increasing investments in data center, the high demand for tier-2 certification standards and the rising expenditure on 4G/5G deployment are some other major factors that will boost market growth during the forecast period," said a senior analyst at Technavio.
The Americas led the market share in 2018, followed by EMEA and APAC respectively. During the forecast period, the Americas region is expected to maintain its dominance over the global market. This is due to several factors such as the rising Internet penetration increasing mobile data traffic, growing investments in 4G/5G network infrastructure, and increasing FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) subscriber base in the region.
