Despite the crumbling economy, the demand for business Ethernet ports increased by 43 percent across the nation last year.
According to Vertical Group Systems, enterprises of all sizes purchased more carrier-based Ethernet services to provision their business networking applications because of the lower bandwidth costs and higher service availability.
“Despite a near paralysis of new telecom spending at the end of the year, there were tens of thousands of new business Ethernet service installs during 2008,” said Rick Malone, principal at Vertical Systems Group. “Deployments were most active in the third quarter, before many enterprises implemented spending freezes or staff reductions. Customer installations in the fourth quarter consisted primarily of follow-through on in-process network conversions.”
Based on retail customer port installations, AT&T maintained its U.S. market leadership in 2008, although considerable momentum by Verizon narrowed the gap. Attaining a position on Vertical Systems Group’s 2008 Business Ethernet Leaderboard with 5 percent or more of the market are eight service providers in the following order by share: AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Telecom, Cox, Qwest, Cogent, Time Warner Cable and Level 3.