Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, ZTE find fortunes in the 100GE core router market

Service providers' ongoing move to deploy 100 Gigabit Ethernet connections in their networks has become a boom for router vendors as shipments of 100 GE ports grew over 150 percent year-over-year, said Dell'Oro Group in a new report. Following several quarters of customer evaluation and testing, a group of vendors including Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Huawei and ZTE are seeing sales from new core routing products.

Alam Tamboli, senior analyst at Dell'Oro Group, said in a release that "we expect the strong growth to continue through 2015 and into 2016 as demand for 100 GE follows or exceeds a similar robust growth pattern that 10 GE did almost a decade ago."

One region that's seen strong core router growth is China, a market where Dell'Oro said sales were strong on a year-over-year basis. Interestingly, service providers have favored Huawei and ZTE over U.S.-based vendors Cisco and Juniper. However, Alcatel-Lucent is gaining new momentum in China and other regions with the release of its new 7950 XRS platforms. Dell'Oro said that service providers are finding utility with Alcatel-Lucent's 100 GE solution. Release