Gigabit Ethernet Test Equipment: Exponential Growth expected

14 June 2012 – The Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) market is growing rapidly, driven by maturing technologies and business models, and increasing market awareness of both the availability of such services and their specific benefits. The hype around cloud technologies has also contributed to the growing demand for GbE. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, European Gigabit Ethernet Test Equipment Market, finds that the market earned revenues of €108.3 million in 2010 and estimates this to reach €154.3 million in 2015. The research covers 1GbE, 10GbE and 40/100 GbE test equipment.

“Bandwidth growth is expected to be pushed by the increasing mobile and Internet bandwidth usage — which includes traffic generated by videos, gaming, and peer-to-peer applications, triple-play applications, inter-data centre traffic, and traffic between data centres and enterprises,” notes Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Prathima Bommakanti. “The evolution of access network to gigabit Ethernet is expected to drive the growth of10Gb Ethernet in the metro network.”

The market is being driven by converged data and applications such as data, voice, audio, gaming, and social networking sites. According to the IEEE P802.3ba specification, 100G and 40G are well aligned with the projected need for more network bandwidth because of multiplay deployments

“A positive trend for the market will be the increased need for monitoring and security that will impel the need for network analysis and hence gigabit Ethernet test equipment,” adds Bommakanti.

Despite being far from a mature market, commoditisation of 1GbE prices continues to erode overall revenue per port. This will prove a significant challenge to market prospects.

“Time-to-market will emerge a critical aspect of product differentiation, as over time the competition starts offering comparable features,” adds Bommakanti. “As products get standardised, they enable interoperability while simultaneously creating a competitive environment.”

This is triggering the need for high investments in R&D. Vendors are continuing to invest in R&D to stay ahead of their competitors, even while keeping track of service providers’ infrastructure upgrades and new service enablement.

Factors like price, geographic coverage, customer service and multi-functional product capabilities will also play an important role in ensuring competitive success.