LightReading took a moment to listen in on the call that Spirent Communications plc held with analysts last week. It found some unusually frank commentary from the company that makes equipment to test telecom gear.

Spirent reported that its results had suffered from consolidation in its customer base. It also parted with the usual convention on these polite calls of citing "weak industry conditions." Spirent named names. It said that orders from Alcatel-Lucent, the company formed through last year's $11.6 billion merger of Lucent Technologies Inc. and Alcatel SA, had decreased some 29% in the recent quarter. That compares with a 32% increase in orders from Nokia Siemens Networks — a rate of growth that Spirent also found disappointing — and order growth of 99% from Juniper Networks Inc.

A 29% drop in orders in any industry is, well, quite a drop. But in the telecom industry, which is racing to introduce new products and expand into new markets and is basically at the core of a fundamental shift in the way people everywhere live and work and entertain themselves — that kind of a drop in orders is more than a little confounding. As Tech Confidential  reported a few weeks ago, Alcatel-Lucent's disappointing second-quarter results show that the merged company hasn't exactly hit the ground running. The fact that the company has reduced spending dramatically suggests we may still not have heard the worst of the story. —Andrea Orr

Go to LightReading item on Spirent
Go to recent Tech Confidential blog entry on Alcatel-Lucent

Tags: Alcatel-Lucent, telecom