According to the Dell'Oro Group, metro optical transport equipment revenues are forecast to reach $9 billion by 2018. WDM equipment sales are expected to drive the majority of the metro optical market's growth for the next five years and comprise the vast majority of revenue by 2018.

"The metro market is in a state of transition as it moves away from SONET/SDH multiplexers and towards high capacity transport equipment," wrote Jimmy Yu, VP of optical transport market research at Dell'Oro. "We believe the result of the network transition will be the continuous decline of SONET/SDH equipment sales at an average annual rate of over 30% a year. In place of those equipment, service providers will shift their focus to higher capacity packet friendly systems such as optical packet-switches and WDM metro. We predict the market demand for optical packet-switch to grow at a 3% compounded annual growth rate until 2018 and for WDM metro to grow at an average annual rate of 9%."