IP Softswitch

 

August 12, 2011

 

The Worldwide Carrier Routing & Switching market is showing significant promise as of late. According to ACG Research, revenues have rebounded in this space, increasing 7.7 percent sequentially and growing 14.3 percent year over year.

These findings were part of the Service Provider Routing & Switching Market Share Report  produced by ACG Research. Overall revenue within the total worldwide carrier routing and switching market grew an estimated $2.95 billion in the second quarter of 2011.

Core routing revenues are shown to be up 2.7 percent quarter over quarter, and 12.4 percent year over year. Subsequently, edge routing and switching revenues were up 9.2 percent quarter over quarter and 14.8 percent year over year.

Cisco (News - Alert) is the clear market lead with 50.8 percent of the total market share. The company is said to be rapidly moving its next-generation switching and routing products across the entire modular and fixed switching segments.

The number two spot is claimed by Juniper at 19.9 percent of the market. This provider continues to gain traction with its proven strategy to capitalize on mobile, Internet and cloud computing solutions portfolio.

For its part, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) is holding a strong third place in the market, benefitting from the momentum generated for 100G IP/optical. Providers are also replacing and leveraging 100GE and IPv6 transition technologies, enabling Alcatel-Lucent to claim 17.9 percent of the overall market.

Tellabs is in fourth place with 3.2 percent of the market, with Huawei (News - Alert) trailing at 2.7 percent.

Ray Mota, managing partner at ACG Research, shared in a statement, “Economic growth remains sluggish but positive. Our current economic implosion is not a repeat of 2008 because there are major differences in some of the economic indicators such as labor and profit growth. In the second half of the year we anticipate 7 to 10 percent growth in the router market. We are seeing carriers invest in mobile and investigate what services they can add to increase ARPU.  We are also seeing them accelerate service creation while optimizing operational readiness with simplicity throughout the network.”

In terms of trends and drivers in this space, there appears to be a link between video assets and monetization assets with IP CAPEX spend. Router decisions are not made on capability alone, but also on other features such as CDN offering, secure content publishing, intelligent distributed video caching and policy control.

There also appears to be significant activity in replacing legacy BRAS equipment with next-generation broadband gateway (BNG). Service providers are increasingly replacing their infrastructure with video-centric, high-capacity. Multiservice edge routes enabling the migration to IPv6, full BRAS and forward looking BNG features.

With the weak economy still struggling to regain its former glory, carriers are investing in mobile technologies and expanding their services to increase ARPU.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi