5/23/2005 -- If market watcher Infonetics Research is right, the networking industry as a whole should experience a heckuva growth spurt over the next few years.

Certainly, voice-over-IP (VoIP) uptake is expected to explode—Infonetics predicts growth in the neighborhood of 1,431 percent by 2009—but vanilla Ethernet services revenue should also do just fine, thank you very much.

According to Infonetics, worldwide Ethernet services revenue exceeded $2.5 billion last year and should more than double this year. But that’s just the beginning. Through 2009, Infonetics projects that Ethernet services revenues will surge by 276 percent, cresting at $22.9 billion.

“The Ethernet services market is on fire for several reasons,” said Michael Howard, a principal analyst with Infonetics, in a statement. “On the end-user side, many companies are hungry for more bandwidth and many are looking to reduce their WAN costs. Ethernet offers the only way to achieve both due to its superior bandwidth capacities and cheaper prices per bit.”

For the same reason, says Howard, increased demand for Gigabit Ethernet should also contribute to an already overflowing Ethernet services revenue pot. “Service providers are also looking for ways to connect their various sites with higher bandwidths at cheaper price per bit, and Gigabit Ethernet point-to-point wholesale services meet this demand,” he said. “And on the equipment side, recent carrier-class improvements have been made to Ethernet products that are enabling service providers to offer new Ethernet services, including those with QoS and SLAs, characteristics of the long-standing private line, frame relay, and ATM services they are now beginning to replace.”

As a result, Howard says, wholesale Ethernet service revenue—most of which can be attributed to sales of point-to-point Gigabit Ethernet links—last year accounted for 25 percent of all Ethernet service revenue. Elsewhere, revenue from retail Ethernet services—i.e., internet, Ethernet private line and transparent LAN services—accounted for about 75 percent of all Ethernet services revenue.

Finally, North America accounted for just one-fifth of all Ethernet service revenues. Asia-Pacific was the worldwide leader, at 40 percent, followed by EMEA at 30 percent. -Stephen Swoyer