The worldwide router market approached an all-time high during the second quarter of this year, buoyed by the growth in the ultra-high end core router segment, according to a recent report from the Dell’Oro Group. Several vendors saw increased sales from new core router products, including Alcatel-Lucent that experienced stronger demand for its new core router platform 7950 XRS, after several quarters of customer evaluation and testing. Alcatel-Lucent's sales of its 7950 XRS, in particular, said Dell'Oro, is attributable to the popularity of the platform's 100 GE solution.
For Huawei and ZTE, both vendors saw increased demand from China, and compared to Cisco and Juniper, the router solutions of these two vendors saw more deployments (year-on-year basis) by service providers in the region.
Alam Tamboli, Senior Analyst at Dell’Oro Group
Impressive double-digit year-over-year growth in the core this quarter was largely driven by the adoption of vendors’ new core routing platforms. These new, higher-capacity platforms are necessary for Service Providers who want to more efficiently deploy 100 GE connections—shipments of 100 GE ports grew over 150 percent year-over-year. We expect the strong growth to continue through 2015 and into 2016 as demand for 100 GE follows or exceeds a similar robust growth pattern that 10 GE did almost a decade ago.
