Infonetics survey says router customers want integrated IPoDWDM and OTN

Infonetics may have confirmed that both Optical Transport Network (OTN) and MPLS will emerge as viable options for IP/optical convergence. Following a previous survey that showed a strong preference among carriers for OTN (see “Infonetics survey says: OTN rules!”), the market research firm has released a new survey that says carrier will want to see routers with both OTN and IP over DWDM (IPoDWDM) interfaces.

Infonetics says the results of its “OTN and IPoDWDM on Routers: Global Service Provider Survey” shows that a majority of carriers expect to deploy IPoDWDM on metro and backbone routers. But they also plan to adopt OTN to carry 100-Gigabit Ethernet, aggregating 10-Gigabit Ethernet signals.

"In a similar survey last year [see "Infonetics: Carrier demand growing for IPoDWDM and OTN on routers"], we discovered that a lot of carriers do indeed want IP over DWDM and OTN integrated into their routers to save money,” confirms Michael Howard, principal analyst and co-founder of Infonetics Research. “This year we drilled deeper to find out where in the network carriers want to use optics, at what speeds, whether they'd use OTN switching or not, etc., and discovered that 83% of them are either already using IPoDWDM on routers or plan to for access, metro, backbone, and/or data center connections. Certainly they don't want optics everywhere or on every router, but it's clear that most want to use IPoDWDM and OTN selectively to help them drive down costs."

However, while the 83% figure for this year held steady from the previous survey, Infonetics reports that fewer respondents to the most recent survey plan to deploy by 2012. This may indicate that some carriers have slowed their deployment plans.

The 16-page “OTN and IPoDWDM on Routers: Global Service Provider Survey” is based on interviews with router purchase decision-makers at 24 incumbent carriers, competitive operators, mobile operators, and cable operators in North America, Asia Pacific, and EMEA. The service providers represent a third of both global telecom capex and revenue, Infonetics asserts.