March 12, 2012
Growth of Routing, Switching Markets Highlights Demand for Switched Access Pricing Solutions
By Beecher Tuttle TMCnet Contributor
The carrier router and switch market continued its explosive growth in 2011 by booking a record $14.5 billion in revenue, powered mainly by double-digit annual growth in Asia and Latin America, according to a new report from market analysis firm Infonetics (News - Alert) Research. The overall market grew 8 percent over 2010 numbers.
Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks, said that the sustained growth in 4Q helped the carrier router and switch market climb to the second largest global telecom segment, trailing only mobile RAN infrastructure.
While acknowledging that carrier router and switch revenue growth slowed in North American and EMEA during Q4, Howard said that fundamental market drivers will continue to push the segment to new heights, "with growing fixed broadband traffic and exploding mobile broadband traffic on 3G and LTE (News - Alert) networks pushing many service providers to upgrade their access, aggregation, and core networks, including mobile backhaul."
The carrier router and switch market – made up by IP edge routers, IP core routers, and carrier Ethernet switches (CES (News - Alert)) – grew to $3.9 billion in Q4 of 2011, representing an 11 percent spike over the previous quarter's total. The IP edge market had a particularly strong quarter, growing 12 percent sequentially and 8 percent year-over-year.
As expected, Cisco (News - Alert) continued to dominate the global IP edge market, although each of its four chief competitors gained market share in 2011, headlined by Alcatel-Lucent, which overtook the No. 2 position in terms of global router revenue.
Meanwhile, the Ethernet switch market posted equally strong revenue numbers in Q4, growing 5.5 percent year-over-year and 1.2 percent sequentially to $6.06 billion, according to fellow analysis firm IDC. As with the carrier router and switch market, the Ethernet segment was powered by particularly strong growth in developing markets like Latin American, the Middle East and Africa.
"The market recovery in the second half of 2011 is very encouraging for the enterprise networking market, with most market segments and regions making a contribution," added Rohit Mehra, director, Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) Infrastructure at IDC. "With Gigabit Ethernet having recovered to a growth trajectory, and with 10GbE and 40GbE expected to drive incremental growth in datacenter and campus core deployments, the ethernet switch market is expected to show moderate growth in 2012."
IDC identified a 2.3 percent year-over-year decline in the worldwide router market, but only due to "exceptional market results" in 4Q of 2010. When looking sequentially, the router market grew 7.3 percent, according to IDC.
The two reports imply strong growth patterns in the switched access pricing market, led by i2Gemini, which provides universal pricing tools for switched access and carrier access billing solutions. The company's hallmark NetExpress solution effectively eliminates unwanted routing costs by leveraging its portfolio of intra- and interstate tariff data and the Local Exchange Routing Guide.
Click here for more information on i2Gemini's switched access pricing solutions.
Edited by Tammy Wolf
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