2006 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch Market Hits New Highs

2006 was a very, very good year for 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch vendors, according to market research firm the Dell'Oro Group.

In the final quarter of last year, the market reached two major markers that show the technology is gaining a major foothold in the enterprise. For one, more than 100,000 Ethernet switch ports shipped. Plus, the market reached this benchmark in a year when vendors claimed annual revenues of more than $1 billion from sales of the high-speed Ethernet switches.Modular 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch ports are still the most in-demand but the fourth quarter also saw a "significant shift toward fixed ports," says Seamus Crehan, senior director of Ethernet switch research at Dell'Oro Group. Crehan says that because of the increased popularity of fixed ports, the average per-port price dropped sharply.

Cisco headed up the pack of vendors scoring big in revenue on demand for the high-speed switches, according to Dell'Oro Group figures. Force10 Networks, Foundry Networks, and Nortel Networks held the next three spots, respectively. Extreme Networks and Hewlett-Packard, with its ProCurve switches rounded out the top five.

The Dell'Oro Group says it expects this growth to continue. In previous forecasts, the research firm predicted that Ethernet ports will hit the 324 million mark in total in 2010, with the majority being Gigabit Ethernet. Thus, the need for more 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to aggregate voice and other high-bandwidth traffic will only continue to surge.

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