Ciena, Cisco take lead in 100G, 400G coherent WDM market, says analyst

As service providers accelerate their 100G and 400G deployments, it’s clear that two vendorsCiena and Ciscoare gaining the benefit as key suppliers in these sectors. Cignal Al confirmed the role these two vendors are taking in the market in its 400G market forecast.

Led by Ciena deployments and then followed by other suppliers six to nine months later, the research firm said that 400G coherent WDM volume shipments will begin to ramp this year.

Likewise, Cignal Al said that Cisco is growing 100G port deployments faster than all other vendors in the market. Meanwhile, Chinese coherent 100G port deployments grew at a healthy pace in the first half of 2017.

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What will accelerate 100G and 400G deployments is the introduction of small form pluggable models. Cignal Al says this innovation will drive the largest optical market transformation since the “Optical Reboot” of 2012-2015 by “eliminating most 10G WDM deployments from the world’s optical infrastructure.”

Cignal Al

Both 100G and 400G coherent will be widely adopted at the edge of the network by the end of 2021.

Forecasts from Cignal Al’s Optical Applications Report estimate that 400G technology will account for nearly one-quarter of all deployed WDM bandwidth in 2020. The report also forecasts that revenue for equipment originally designed for the data center interconnect (DCI) market will reach $1 billion by 2019, as these systems become widely adopted outside of traditional DCI applications.

Complementing the 400G and 100G growth are two other key innovationscompact modular equipment and packet-OTN switching.

While modular equipment was initially designed to accommodate data center deployments, a host of traditional incumbent, wholesale, and cable MSOs will use these systems incorporated with open software to build disaggregated optical networks.

Cignal Al noted that compact modular equipment spending more than tripled in the first half of 2017 over the same period last year. Ciena, Cisco, and Infinera are the dominant suppliers for this sector.

At the same time, traditional service providers such as Verizon are expanding advanced packet-OTN deployments. Packet-OTN systems revenue grew in the double digits in the first half of 2017, up from the same period in 2016.

Cignal Al said Verizon’s deployment of these systems is rising and will affect vendor market share more materially in the second half of 2017.