Pushed along by investments in routers for mobile backhaul networks, the service provider edge router market is expected to approach $9 billion worldwide by 2018.
The North American market drove the worldwide demand for mobile backhaul networks from 2009 through last year, but with LTE deployments largely completed service providers have started to taper their investments in this region, according to a report by Dell’Oro Group.
“As LTE networks are being deployed in China and across Europe, router demand in mobile backhaul networks is taking off, with service providers expanding capacity to handle data traffic generated by LTE users,” said Alam Tamboli, business analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “In North America, we witnessed a rapid deployment cycle, whereas in the case of Europe, we expect the cycle to be longer due to differences in the competitive landscape and a larger population size.”