Disruptive Technologies Assessment of the US Wavelength Services Market, Forecast to 2025

This research study examines the US market for wavelength services from 2019 to 2025. The revenue analysis in the study is separated into retail (sales to enterprises) and wholesale (sales to communication service providers, system integrators, content providers, cloud service providers, and resellers), with additional breakouts by transport length and speed.

Wavelength services in this study include all native wave services: 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps, and 1 GigE, 10GE, and 100GE Ethernet services offered over waves. Most service providers in the US market offer transparent wave services, where the service is protocol-independent, allowing customers to run any protocol over the waves. Protocols that are typically run on native wavelength services are Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON), Fiber Connection (FICON), Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Fiber Channel, Digital Video, GigE, 10 Gbps LAN PHY and WAN PHY, and Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) OC-48 and OC-192. Some service providers categorize their wave services depending on the application that is being run on the waves.

The wavelength services market will continue to witness single-digit growth rates throughout the forecast period because of exponential bandwidth demand from wholesale and retail customers. Ethernet over waves (EoW) continues to influence the market growth, with almost all service providers interviewed for the study confirming that the majority of their sales in the past year have been for EoW circuit, versus native or transparent waves.

Cloud service providers represent a growing segment of opportunity for wavelength services, especially the 10GE and 100GE speeds. The industry is divided on where to include this customer segment (whether as wholesale or retail), since cloud service providers buy like wholesale customers in terms of volumes but behave like a retail or business customer in terms of the high-touch sales process. In this report, revenue from cloud service providers are included in the wholesale segment.

Frost & Sullivan conducted detailed primary interviews with leading communication service providers, analyzed their quarterly and annual reports, and utilized internal databases to perform detailed revenue analysis on the wavelength services market. The resulting revenue size reflects a sum of the estimates for individual companies.

Author: Carina Goncalves