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Current network infrastructure is continually adapting to meet the increasing demand of consumers and organizations as bandwidth usage keeps exceeding limitations. The deployment of LTE (News - Alert) networks, hosted cloud solutions, streaming services and consumer created rich media is generating massive amounts of data. In order to cope with the scale, equipment manufacturers are producing routers designed to meet this challenge, and the record year for the North American service provider router market highlights the growing demand.

The Dell (News - Alert)'Oro Group published a report indicating the global service provider router market reached record highs in 2014 with almost $10 billion.

Service provider routers are a class of network controller designed to find the best route for data and voice transmission between the sender and receiver. Generally their controlled by software and can be programmed to deliver the best available routes with the least cost.

According to Dell'Oro, the market growth is being driven from routers that are being deployed in the service provider edge. This includes routers that are being used in mobile backhaul, especially for LTE networks, which remained the biggest source of revenue as service providers upgrade their networks, this according to the analyst of the report.

“As operators in the region scale back Capex in the coming year, either due to completing their mobile backhaul networks, investing in NFV or SDN technologies, or in other cost-cutting initiatives, we may see a regional mix shift in 2015,” said Alam Tamboli, Senior Analyst at Dell'Oro Group.

The North American region accounted for almost 40 percent of the worldwide market, but globally other regions are making considerable investments. The leading vendors in the sector were Cisco (News - Alert) Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks, and Huawei (News - Alert) Technologies respectively, accounting for more than 93 percent of 2014 revenue.

Network operators around the world must come together to solve the problem of how to manage the increasing number of connections without losing quality of experience. Hardware alone will not be the solution, new level of application awareness must be part of the ecosystem with NFV and SDN technologies.

The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update for 2015 reveals key data points that will challenge operators. According to the forecast, global mobile data traffic grew 69 percent in 2014, and it reached 2.5 exabytes per month at the end of 2014, up from 1.5 exabytes per month at the end of 2013. Additionally a fourth-generation (4G) connection generated 10 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection. This is despite the fact currently they only represent 6 percent of mobile, however they already account for 40 percent of mobile data traffic.