* Dell'Oro Group quantifies the market for 10 Gigabit Ethernet
The Dell’Oro Group last week said that the market for 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching equipment reached $302 million in the second quarter of this year.
The research firm said that chassis-based switches rebounded in the quarter after a lull in the first quarter of this year, and that helped the overall number. At $302 million, revenue is on pace for more than a billion-dollar annual run rate.
The firm also said that average selling prices of 10 Gigabit ports actually rose in the quarter, but that it expects the general trend of price declines to resume once vendors introduce products that tend to bring down costs, like higher port-density line cards and fixed-configuration switches.
Meanwhile, Dell’Oro also noted that WLAN products based on the draft of the IEEE 802.11n specification began shipping last quarter, and those sales helped boost the small office and home office market during what is usually a seasonally slow quarter. These products have a greater range and speed than previous WLAN gear.
But draft-802.11n routers are also twice as expensive as 802.11g routers. Dell’Oro notes that when 802.11g came out, the routers were only 28% more expensive than the 802.11b routers already on the market. So the price differential this time around is significant.
Interestingly, shipments of broadband customer-premises equipment with WLAN capability embedded in it was up 30% over the same period last year.
Separately, Dell’Oro also forecasted that most Fibre Channel switches and host bus adapters will remain at 4Gbps beyond 2010. That’s because 8Gbps Fibre Channel won’t be able to offer a price advantage over 4Gbps in the next few years.
