Week in research: Carrier Ethernet spending to slow; manufacturers look to hosted services

Wireless backhaul cements telco profit: Ethernet's flexibility in meeting growing demands for bandwidth has made it a mainstay of the growth puzzle for traditional telecoms and service providers, but those companies may not be able to rely upon it much longer. Insight Research predicts in a new study that while spending on carrier Ethernet services will reach $5 billion in 2012, spending will begin to moderate. That's because much of the TDM to Ethernet conversion is complete, said Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight. "Over the five year forecast period we project a compounded annual revenue growth rate of 17 percent, with growth slowing by 2016 to be more in the range of 12 to 15 percent." News release

Pay TV climbs upward: More than half of all pay-TV subscribers are located in Asia-Pacific, TeleGeography reports, and contributed to a global growth of 10 percent per year between 2005 and 2011. Along with subscribers spread more evenly across North America, Western Europe, and other regions, total pay-TV subscribers worldwide reached almost 800 million last year and will grow to more than 1 billion by 2016. Blog post

TeleGeography pay TV subscribers 2012

Hosted services key to manufacturers' growth: Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO), Avaya and Siemens (NYSE: SI) lead the pack of manufacturer-provided services to enterprises, a $17 billion market that will likely grow to more than $25 billion by 2016, according to Infonetics Research. These services already make up a big chunk of the above manufacturers' revenues (as well as revenues of smaller, more fragmented manufacturers). "One of the key growth segments is hosted services, which many vendors are starting to offer to deliver technology in any fashion, including both CPE and cloud-based models, and to respond to shifts in customer preferences," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video. News release

Manufacturer provided services to enterprises