The global Virtual routers or vRouters are expected to grow 125 percent from 2015 to 2016 – fuelled by Asia Pacific, said IHS.

Brocade’s Vyatta vRouter is one of the examples of Virtual routers.

IHS said the global service provider router and switch market increased 3 percent from a year ago and fell 13 percent from the previous quarter to $3.3 billion in Q1 2015.

Dell’Oro Group earlier said that the worldwide service provider edge router market grew slowly at three percent in the first quarter 2015 after a record year in 2014.

IHS said the router and carrier Ethernet switch (CES) market revenue increased in North America, EMEA and Latin America, while Asia Pacific was down.

The telecom service provider router and switch market will achieve 2.1 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the 5 years from 2014 to 2019 – fuelled by the architectural changes based on virtualization and packet-optical technologies.

Despite telecoms’ plans to move more services off edge routers and onto NFV servers and to shift more metro and transport functions to packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS), revenue will grow slowly, said Michael Howard, senior research director for carrier networks at IHS.

Alam Tamboli, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group, said: “We continue to see telecom service providers invest heavily in their mobile backhaul networks and associated routers due to increased traffic demand. However, many operators have slowed their spending on routers used for fixed networks, partially offsetting this growth.”

Dell’Oro Group in a June 2015 telecom analysis report said that Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks, and Huawei Technologies were the market share leaders in the service provider router market, accounting for over 92 percent of revenue in Q1.

Baburajan K
[email protected]