Cisco continues to dominate the market for edge routers and carrier Ethernet switches, with service providers also naming Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei as top vendors.
“There’s a big gap between these four and their competitors, and it just gets harder for any manufacturer who’s not already on top of the heap,” said Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. Infonetics asked service providers to name the top three vendors for edge routers and carrier Ethernet switches. 80% named Cisco, 70% named Juniper, 60% named Alcatel-Lucent, and 40% named Huawei. Tellabs and Brocade were also named by a significant number of service providers.
Survey respondents ranked the price-to-performance ratio the #1 criterion when selecting an edge router/CES vendor, followed by product reliability. Infonetics interviewed network equipment purchase-decision makers at 20 incumbent, independent wireless, competitive, and cable operators.
The Infonetics survey is somewhat indicative of market shares, but there is a large amount of spending in this market that is not captured here. The firm says that the operators it interviewed represent 36% of global telecom capital expenditures.
