Sandvine has received more than $6.5 million in follow-on “Network Policy Control” orders from a top-five Asian communications service provider, after getting an initial order in May 2012.

The follow-on order will apparently support additional geographic locations.

Since May 2012, Sandvine has announced orders from tier-one Asian operators that total approximately $20 million, giving Sandvine “the highest market share in the region,” the company says. 


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The larger importance of the orders is that the Asia-Pacific region will feature the greatest single concentration of communications customers and revenue mass of any region in the world, over the coming years.

So any supplier with ambitions to grow globally has to succeed in the Asia-Pacific region. That is a bit of a change from where growth drivers have been seen for much of the past decade.

Though Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have been leading economic and communications adoption growth for much of the past decade, it now appears that those nations are reaching maturity, and that growth of communications services will be lead by a new list of nations in the emerging markets.

Overall, that growth–on a percentage basis–will likely be lead by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, exclusive of China and India.

Globally, emerging markets remain crucial for global telecom service provider growth. IDC predicts that emerging markets will account for 53 percent of 2012’s global information and communications technology growth.

And a poll of 675 global IT and business professionals suggests Indonesia, Vietnam, Qatar and Myanmar are the countries to lead that growth. But Israel, Iraq, Uganda and Cambodia were other countries also viewed as countries where growth could occur.

Notably, just five percent of respondents chose Brazil, Russia, India, China or South Africa as among the nations having the strongest growth, though the so-called BRICS nations have been at the top of global growth lists for some years.

Mobile will drive growth in the Asia-Pacific region, as elsewhere. But developing nations also will become the focus of broadband growth over the next decade or two, building on a substantial amount of growth since about 2005.

By the end of 2011, 2.3 billion people (around a third the world’s population) accessed the Internet globally, almost double the 1.2 billion figure recorded in 2006, according to Ofcom. Over this period, growth in Internet use was fastest among developing countries, and by 2011 62 percent of Internet users were located in developing countries, an increase from 44 percent in 2006. And the majority of those users are in Asia.


Edited by Brooke Neuman