A recently published report by the Dell’Oro Group says that the worldwide broadband access market — which it defines as cable, DSL and PON technologies — reached a record level, exceeding $12 billion in 2015 and driven by PON.

The market research firm adds that in 2016, “cable modem is predicted to make a comeback.”

“PON revenue grew by 21 percent to over $6 billion in 2015. Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel-Lucent all benefitted from strong deployments into China, especially in customer premises equipment,” Alam Tamboli, senior analyst at Dell’Oro, reports.

In North America, Alcatel-Lucent, Calix and ADTRAN gained strength as both large and small service providers continue to deploy gigabit services, Tamboli adds.

Dell’Oro reports that demand for both DSL and cable technologies fell in 2015, but predicts that upcoming technologies, like DOCSIS 3.1, G.fast and 35b should help to turn this trend around in 2016.

“This will be especially important as service providers, whose current infrastructure is based around DOCSIS or DSL technologies, will look to more effectively and efficiently compete with competitors who utilize fiber,” Tamboli notes. “In fact, we forecast the total broadband access market to grow with positive contributions from all three technologies in 2016.”

Recent news from CableLabs about Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 certainly adds some powerful firepower to cable’s engineering strategy.

“In Full Duplex communication, the upstream and downstream traffic use the same spectrum at the same time, doubling the efficiency of spectrum use,” Belal Hamzeh, VP Wireless, R&D, and Dan Rice, SVP, R&D at CableLabs revealed in a blog post. “A DOCSIS 3.1 Full Duplex network provides the peak speeds and flexibility of TDD, but one-ups both TDD and FDD with double the capacity.”

More coverage of Full Duplex is available here.