Michael Howard, senior research director and advisor, carrier networks at IHS Markit, said that the purchase of 100GE router has more than doubled from 2016 to 2018.
100GE will make up 38 percent of telecom operator’s 10/40/100GE port purchases during 2018 –more than two times that of 2016, according to IHS Markit’s operator respondents.
70 percent of operators surveyed are deploying packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) or plan to do so by 2018.
70 percent of respondents plan to deploy central office re-architected as a data center (CORD) in their smart central offices (COs).
ALSO READ: Routing, NFV, and packet-optical strategies survey by IHS Markit
The IHS Markit survey is based on interviews with router / CES purchase decision-makers at 20 service providers that control 36 percent of worldwide telecom capex and a third of revenue.
The latest survey says telecom is moving to 100G now. Sixteen percent of the 10/40/100GE router ports our survey participants purchased in 2016 were 100GE on average, and these service providers expect their 100GE port purchases to more than double to 38 percent in 2018.
In 2017, 88 to 96 percent operator respondents expect to be paying “10GE parity” or less in three main areas of their networks. “Parity” means that a 100GE port is priced at ten times the price of a 10GE port.
P-OTS remains an integral part of carrier network architecture. Seventy percent of respondents are deploying P-OTS or plan to do so by 2018.
The percentage of nodes with P-OTS is anticipated to grow six-fold in core/long haul and almost double in access, aggregation, metro core and regional between 2016 and 2018. These plans will keep a damper on router sales. Operator respondents have little current demand for a multi-layer data/transport control plane.
95 percent of operators surveyed are using or planning to use smart COs by deploying servers and storage in selected COs to create mini data centers to offer cloud services and to use them as the NFV infrastructure on which to run virtual network functions (VNFs).
Seventy percent of respondents plan to deploy CORD – that combines NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) software to improve elasticity and bring data center economics and cloud agility to their COs—30 percent by the end of 2017 and an additional 40 percent in 2018 or later.
