Routers and Ethernet switches up 8% from 2010 even though North America and Europe lag
The carrier router and switch market hit a record-high $14.5 billion in 2011, up 8% over 2010, according to Infonetics Research. Yet the 2011 results also indicate that the overall market may be slowing.
Despite continued double-digit percent growth in Asia, the largest market, and Latin America, the smallest, North America and Europe/Middle East/Africa are slowing, the firm found. Yet, growing fixed broadband traffic and exploding mobile broadband traffic on 3G and LTE networks is still forcing service providers to upgrade access, aggregation, core and mobile backhaul networks, which will continue to stoke healthy market growth — with the exception of the recession in 2009, router sales grew by double-digit percentages each year until 2011, when they increased 9.9%, Infonetics found.
The global service provider router and switch market, which includes IP edge routers, IP core routers, and carrier Ethernet switches, grew 11% sequentially to $3.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. North America is the only region to post a decline in carrier router and switch spending both sequentially in Q4 and for all of 2011.
EMEA saw a 21% hike in router and switch spending due to a seasonal budget flush, and despite the economic crises in Greece and elsewhere. Revenue in Latin America was up 22%, while China and Japan led growth in Asia.
IP edge routers and Ethernet switches grew 12% from Q3 and 8% for the year. Cisco continues to lead this segment with one-third of the global market in 2011, Infonetics found. Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Juniper and ZTE all gained share in 2011 as well.
Alcatel-Lucent gained the #2 spot for global router revenue in Q4, despite not having a core router product, Infonetics found. Infonetics competitor IDC still has Alcatel-Lucent ranked # 3 behind Juniper, but only by one-tenth of a percentage point.
IDC found that the service provider router market – core and edge – grew 9% in 2011 from 2010, to $10.034 billion. But in the fourth quarter it actually declined slightly from a year ago, by 1% to $2.7 billion.
Cisco’s revenue dipped 3.7% in Q4 from last year, but Juniper’s dropped 22%, IDC found. Juniper is going through a challenging product transition in the core, as service providers size up its new T4000 router and plan the migration from the predecessor T1600.
IDC even found that Alcatel-Lucent’s Q4 revenue dropped 8% from the same period a year ago. Meanwhile, Huawei’s revenue jumped 72%.
For the full year of 2011, Cisco revenue inched up by 2%, Juniper’s by 6.6%, Alcatel-Lucent’s by 24% and Huawei’s by 32.6%, IDC found. Others of note are Ericsson, which saw revenue climb 69%, Brocade, which more than doubled revenue to $70 million, and Tellabs, which lost more than half of its revenue, to $167 million.
More from Cisco Subnet:
30 events that shaped Cisco in 2011
New Cisco cloud computing framework pushes management, collaboration
Cisco data center forecast very cloudy
Cisco reorgs again, folds net mgmt into new cloud group
Chambers: Cisco’s Q1 solid, but access routers, Nexus 7000 lagging
Cisco taps former VMware exec to head security push
Huawei gunning for Cisco in the enterprise
Cisco upgrades WAN optimizers
Gasp! Cisco and HP collaborate on blade switch
Cisco unveils latest Nexus data center switch
Follow all Cisco Subnet bloggers on Twitter.Jim Duffy on TwitterFollow
