By Telecom Lead Team: The carrier router and switch
market achieved $14.5 billion revenue in 2011, up 8 percent over 2010. Cisco,
Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Juniper and ZTE are the top five vendors in the market.
The service provider routers and switches market is the
second largest telecom market segment after mobile RAN infrastructure.
Cisco continues to lead the IP Edge segment, commanding
about a third of the global market in 2011, while its competitors —
Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Juniper, ZTE — all gained market share in 2011.
Alcatel-Lucent’s performance propelled it into the #2
spot for global router revenue in Q 4 2011, and it retained #2 position for
2011 EMEA router revenue.
2011 results show signs of a slowdown in the market’s
overall growth rate. Because despite continued double-digit percent annual
growth in the largest market, Asia, and the smallest market, Latin America, the
two mainstays of carrier routers and switches, North America and EMEA, are
slowing. Still, the fundamental market drivers will pace the overall market
forward, with growing fixed broadband traffic and exploding mobile broadband
traffic on 3G and LTE networks pushing many service providers to upgrade their
access, aggregation, and core networks, including mobile backhaul,” said
Michael Howard, Infonetics Research’s co-founder and principal analyst for
carrier networks.
The global service provider router and switch market,
which includes IP edge routers, IP core routers, and carrier Ethernet switches
(CES), grew 11 percent sequentially to $3.9 billion in the final quarter of
2011.
In Q4 2011, the IP edge segment (the sum of IP edge
routers and CES), grew 12 percent sequentially and is up 8 percent in 2011.
North America is the only world region to post a decline
in carrier router and switch spending both quarter-over-quarter in Q4 2011 as
well as in 2011.
EMEA had a seasonally typical budget flush, with a 21
percent pop in router and switch spending, despite a poorer year and the
ongoing euro/Greece/debt/etc. crisis.
Ongoing network upgrade projects in South America and
Mexico led to a banner year for service provider router and switch vendors in
Latin America (revenue up 22 percent in 2011), and China and Japan propped up
Asia.
