The optical transport network (OTN) equipment market is well on its way to topping the $13 billion mark by 2017, according to a recent study by Infonetics Research.

Last year the OTN transport and switching equipment market grew 8 percent to $7.3 billion with the bulk of that growth coming from the OTN switching segment, which was up 46 percent in 2012 from 2011.

“OTN spending, and particularly OTN switching, is benefiting from a rise in investment in coherent core networks,” said Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics Research. “Many service providers rolling out 100G are using the opportunity to upgrade their optical switching infrastructure. In the metro, investment is rapidly rotating away from legacy SONET/SDH to packet-optical transport systems that combine optical and Ethernet circuit switching in the same chassis.”

As an early adopter of OTN technology, North America leads the world in overall OTN deployments while China is out in front on OTN switching deployments, according to Infonetics.

Infinera was the top OTN switching vendor in North America last year, despite only recognizing revenue in the latter half of the year

Sales of packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) gear climbed 7 percent in 2012, to $1.2 billion. Tellabs and Fujitsu together garnered the lion’s share of the P-OTS market as a result of their aggressive deployments at Verizon, while Ciena, Cisco, and Alcatel-Lucent remained in a tight three-way race.