Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Juniper and ZTE are the top 5 vendors in global service provider router and switch market in first quarter of 2012.
In Q4 2011, top 5 vendors were Cisco, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE and Juniper.
In the first quarter of 2012, Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei together took 96 percent of core router revenue.
Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, and Juniper gained IP Edge market share. Cisco increased its share from about 31 percent to about 39 percent q-o-q.
Infonetics Research said Cisco has the biggest installed base of routers at both operators and enterprises.
Infonetics Research forecast that Alcatel-Lucent, which just entered the core router market, will shake up the vendor market share landscape.
Service provider routers and switches are the second largest telecom market segment in 2011 total revenue (~$14.5 billion) after mobile RAN spending ($30+ billion).
The service provider router and switch market includes IP edge routers, IP core routers, and carrier Ethernet switches (CES). It sequentially decreased 14 percent to $3.3 billion in the first quarter of 2012. From the year-ago first quarter, the market is down 1 percent.
"The best way to look at the carrier router and switch market is to analyze the 'IP Edge,' the sum of edge routers and carrier Ethernet switches, since routers can switch and switches can route, and many are deployed both ways," said Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks.
The North American market was up 27 percent q-o-q and up 9 percent from the year-ago first quarter.