Sales of optical networking equipment could reach $20 billion by 2017, a 5% compound annual growth rate, driven by new data center demands, said Ovum. The firm forecasts that Latin America will be the highest growth region, boosted by network modernization efforts to enhance regional connectivity in support of mobile and broadband access network build outs.
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In Latin America, the ON market has been bolstered by rising incomes, which have driven network operator revenue growth, Ovum highlighted.
Ian Redpath, principal analyst in Ovum’s Network Infrastructure practice, noted data centers are the new bandwidth drivers as large-scale data centers are expected to continue to be built out – both the multi-tenant, carrier-neutral variety and private data centers.
North America is expected to exhibit solid growth as tier-one network operators embrace 100G technology to meet growing data center needs.
Ovum said its expects the Asia-Pacific to continue to grow, but will cool a bit after five years of torrid growth. The EMEA market is expected to expand, despite the current macro-economic malaise, due to deployment activity in Russia, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe and Africa. Across the Southeast U.K. over 150 data centers were built outside of central London that require high-bandwidth interconnection.
Redpath noted that in China the optical network market has tripled in size over the past five years and continues to grow. He added that much of the core backbone was built in support of early generations of mobile technology, but there is still a wave of high-speed fixed broadband and next-generation mobile to come.
