For the sixth straight quarter, the service provider core router market continued its decline in the fourth quarter of last year as market revenue fell to its lowest level since the third quarter of 2009.

Dell’Oro Group’s latest research said market revenue core routers dropped because network operators cut back investments on their backbone networks.

“For the past two years, we have seen many service providers prioritize investments for mobile and residential broadband networks and scale back core router purchases” said Shin Umeda, vice president at Dell’Oro Group.  “We expect the core router market to rebound in 2013 as network operators rebuilding capacity with the latest generation of high capacity router.”

Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei were the market share leaders of the service provider core router market, accounting for more than 95 percent of fourth quarter revenue.  Cisco remained the share leader with more than half of the market for the fourth quarter.  Juniper was clearly the second ranked vendor, and Huawei made gains as the No. 3  manufacturer. 

Worldwide Service Provider Core Router Market Leaders (Revenue)

Vendor		4Q12 Rank		Y/Y Growth
Cisco		1		-20%
Juniper		2		-18%
Huawei		3		23%