Bright future for GigE market

According to a report from CIR, an industry analyst firm based in the US, the market for 40/100 gigabit ethernet products will begin to take off in 2010.

The latest projections, which are provided in details in the report, titled 40/100 GigE Markets: 2009-2013, show that revenue from 40/100 GigE transceivers will reach $482 million by 2013.

CIR believes that the economic downturn will not delay early adopters of 40/100 GigE as companies such as Google and Amazon have a "desperate need" for 100G connections today.

Although the current economic downturn is having an impact on carrier network upgrades, scaling carrier networks to 100 Gbps will now only be accomplished using a 40/100-Gbps variant.

The company says that a handful of firms have the opportunity to shape the future of 40/100 GigE. These include Cisco, Juniper, Sun Microsystems, Force10, Nortel at the OEM level; JDSU, Finisar, Avago, Luxtera and Opnext at the transceiver level. At the component level there is Xilinx, Altera, IBM, LSI, Gennum, AMCC, Vitesse and Broadcom.

The adoption of 40G ethernet will occur first in high-end servers and high-performance computing applications. Within the 40GigE environment, initially as much as 80% of the market will be accounted for by the SR4 version of the 40/100 GigE standard.

However, the SR4 version is expected to lose share to CR4 over time as 40-Gbps-over-copper becomes more viable. The CIR expects both CR4 and SR4 to quickly lose share once serial 40GigE becomes a reality in 2014.

CIR believes that 100G ethernet will be adopted in the core of the network, driven by growth in 10GigE server connections and access points. As 100GigE begins to generate revenues in around 2012, it is expected that the LR4 variant will account for maybe half the market, with SR10 taking another 20%.

Improvements in copper technology should drive CR10 share of the 100 Gbps space to 25% or so by 2016.