Infonetics Research Conducts Optical Vendor Survey

Market research firm Infonetics Research has released excerpts from its "Optical Equipment Features and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey," featuring optical vendor ratings by carriers around the world.

Survey highlights include:

• Ciena, Alcatel-Lucent, and Huawei top the list of vendors that carriers consider to be among the top three optical vendors;
• Huawei leads vendors under evaluation for purchase in the next year, followed by Alcatel-Lucent and Ciena;
• Ciena dominates the 40G/100G leadership rankings;
• Alcatel-Lucent and Ciena top the list of vendors that carriers consider to be leaders in the P-OTS market;
• Huawei has the highest percentage of service providers that think they are making the best technology investments today that will result in products needed for future networks;
• The most-missed optical equipment feature by carriers is software-, not hardware-related.

The report, part of Infonetics’ Continuous Research Service (CRS) series of analyst reports and surveys about the optical market, provides insight into carrier plans and preferred features for optical network hardware, which optical vendors are being used and evaluated by carriers, and which vendors carriers perceive as the leaders in optical transmission and switching, 40G and 100G transmission technology, next generation packet-optical transmission systems (P-OTS), next generation OTN/ODU crossconnects, and best technology investments.

For the survey, Infonetics interviewed purchase decision-makers with detailed knowledge of their company’s optical transmission equipment at telecom service providers that have an optical transport network. The service providers interviewed are a mix of incumbent and competitive operators in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, and represent 23 percent of the world’s telecom carrier revenue.