Telecom service providers worldwide bought more than US$36 billion of equipment to enhance their wireline networks in 2007, up more than 10 percent over 2006, according to Dell’Oro Group.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based networking research company said that sales to service providers for wireline infrastructure have not approached this level since the year 2000.
The largest increases in capex spend was on optical transport and routers, followed distantly by IP voice equipment (such as media gateways and softswitches), and carrier Ethernet switches. Spending on broadband access and multiservice switching declined. Cisco captured the bulk of spend on routers while Alcatel-Lucent captured spend on optical transport. Nokia Siemens and Nortel captured the majority of spend on IP voice equipment.
Overall, Cisco Systems captured 34 per cent of the worldwide wireline equipment spending by service providers last year, up from 29 per cent the year before. Alcatel-Lucent captured 29 per cent, up from 26 per cent in 2006. In third place last year was Huawei with 14 per cent of the market, followed by Nortel Networks with 11 per cent, Nokia Seimens with eight per cent and Ericsson with four per cent.