* 10 Gigabit switch ports to help Ethernet switch market recovery
Sales of Ethernet switches are expected to hit record highs this year.
That’s right – Dell’Oro Group is saying that this year will be even bigger than 2000, and that steady growth will continue through the rest of the decade.
The year 2000 was the height of the economic boom, right before the bottom fell out and everyone stopped needing new Ethernet switches so much. Perhaps they just tried to do more with less instead. Perhaps they needed fewer switches because they had massive layoffs resulting in fewer desktops to feed with bandwidth. Whatever the case, they weren’t buying.
It has taken a few years, but we seem to have recovered. Fueling that recovery will be 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch ports; revenue from the high-speed ports are expected to more than double in 2005, 2006 and 2007, Dell’Oro says. The simple reason for that is the prevalence of Gigabit Ethernet. All those Gigabit lines need to be aggregated for network cores – and the prices of 10 Gig are coming down, as well.
In related news, Dell’Oro also predicts that the worldwide router market will remain strong through the next five years, becoming a $10 billion market by 2009. Most of that spending will come from service providers rather than enterprise companies, and much of the investment will happen at the core of their networks rather than at the edge, to aggregate large numbers of broadband subscribers, Dell’Oro says.
In a nutshell, then, big bandwidth is back. While sales of network equipment have been down for a few years, companies have slowly accumulated more high-speed connections at their edges. Now they’re faced with the prospect of aggregating those connections in their network cores – and now, perhaps, they have the money to do so.
