* Dell'Oro Group's predictions for Ethernet, wireless LANs and more
As part of a slew of networking-related forecasts for the coming years, the Dell’Oro Group recently projected the Ethernet switch market to pass $19 billion in annual revenue by 2011 and said the SOHO wireless LAN market will double during that same time period.
The research firm said revenues are likely to grow steadily over the next five years. Helping to drive growth are technologies such as Power over Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet’s 10GBase-LRM (for low-cost fiber optics) and 10GBase-T (for low-cost copper).
Interestingly, the group notes that less than 20% of the desktop installed base has Gigabit Ethernet available to it, so the upgrade cycle to Gigabit is really just getting started. Low-cost 10 Gigabit will only help to drive that growth further.
Meanwhile, the firm said that by 2011 the small-office, home-office WLAN market should double in size from its 2006 level of $3.9 billion. Driving that growth, not surprisingly, will be products based on the IEEE 802.11n specification.
WLAN use among broadband subscribers is expected to rise to an astonishing 75%. Think of how many people have broadband access today – cable modems and DSL. Three out of four of them will have WLANs? Time to start wardriving.
In related news, Dell’Oro predicted that sales of Fibre Channel switches would surpass $2 billion in 2008, continuing to increase over the next five years. The firm says it based the prediction on the fact that more fiber-optic lines are being installed; once fiber is in, going to Fibre Channel is the best choice for storage networking.
