Service provider interest in packet-optical transport deployments wanes, says IHS Infonetics

While service providers are still moving ahead with their packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) plans for this year and next, a new Infonetics survey reveals that interest dropped a bit.

The research firm found that 78 percent of respondents have already deployed P-OTS or plan to by the end of 2016, down 8 percentage points compared to a year ago. 

Survey respondents told Infonetics that the percentage of P-OTS equipment was nearly the same as it was in 2014, illustrating that only a small amount of expansion took place over the last 12 months and it was slower than last year's survey participants anticipated.

"Compared with results from last year, overall enthusiasm for P-OTS waned a little in our latest packet-optical survey, with responses for the reasons behind deploying P-OTS and the expected number of nodes using this functionality sliding a little," said Andrew Schmitt, research director for carrier transport networking at IHS Infonetics, in a release.

Schmitt added that the slowdown in P-OTS deployments could be related to service providers focusing more attention on other things like virtualizing functions to interconnect data centers.

"The increased focus on data center interconnect and the virtualized functions expected to reside within may be reducing the pressure to use technologies like P-OTS to converge multiple networks," Schmitt said.

Regardless of the slower deployment cycles, survey participants said that P-OTS equipment reduces network complexity and that vendors are offering the right equipment.

In tandem with P-OTS, Infonetics said that nearly all of the respondents plan to deploy transport software-defined networking (SDN). However, over half don't expect to begin deploying that technology until 2017 or later.

For more:
- see the release

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