Cisco held onto the top spot in the third quarter in the service provider router segment, but the quarter was slow overall.
According to Dell'Oro Group, Cisco was followed by Huawei, Nokia and Juniper Networks in the service provider router sector in Q3. Overall, the service provider router market was down 3% year-over-year in the third quarter.
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In last month's earnings reports, both Cisco and Juniper reported that their router revenues were down due to a slowdown in service provider spending and fallout from the ongoing tariffs. In particular, Juniper's service provider segment was down 17% year-over-year to $453 million in the third quarter, primarily due slower routing sales.
Service provider router rankings by region showed Cisco holding down the top spot in North America, while Nokia led the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, and Huawei ranked first in the Asia-Pacific region.
Cisco and Juniper executives said on last month's earnings calls that they expected large-scale 5G deployments and 400G rollouts by hyperscale cloud providers would start to goose their bottom lines next year ahead of larger deployments for both in 2021.
“Service provider router demand continues to lack a strong set of drivers, and other than the China market, 5G RAN deployments are not yet driving significant investments in mobile backhaul and transport networks,” said Shin Umeda, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, in a statement. “Routers supporting 400 Gbps interfaces are just becoming available, but the material impact to the market isn’t likely until 2021."
Cisco continued to hold down the top spot for data center switch revenue, but white box vendors Arista and H3C gained market share in the third quarter compared to the previous Q3, according to research by Dell'Oro Group.