U.S. enterprises and consumers are expected to spend more than $44 billion over the next five years (in aggregate) on Ethernet services provided by carriers, according to a new market research study from The Insight Research Corporation.
Insight Research Corp., though, uses a different definition than the Metro Ethernet Forum. Insight Research uses the term “public Ethernet” refers to any Layer 2 public network carrier service that extends Ethernet beyond the LAN and connects to customers across Ethernet interfaces.
Insight Research also notes, though, that there is a double count. “We are counting ’sell through’ service at two points. Total Ethernet revenue incorporates both monies paid by end-users to carriers for a service and the amount carriers pay other carriers to provide that same service.”
In other words, the figures include both the value of capacity sold to wholesale customers, and then the retail revenue booked by those wholesale partners when they sell to an enterprise, for example.
With metro-area and wide-area Ethernet services readily available from virtually all major data service providers, the market is expected to grow from $4 billion in 2011 to reach nearly $11.1 billion by 2016.
Carrier Ethernet services was a $3.2 billion market in 2010, the firm says. .
“Wireless backhaul is the fastest-growing sector within the Ethernet marketplace,” says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research, about the results. An additional specific factor contributing to particularly rapid growth over the next few years will be the large-scale “mass migration” of wireless backhaul from TDM to Ethernet, which will particularly bolster growth in the metro and at moderate (>10 Mbit/s – 100 Mbit/s) bandwidth levels.