AT&T has retained the top spot on Vertical Systems Group’s (VSG) mid-2023 U.S. Carrier Ethernet Leaderboard, which measures market leadership based on market share results. AT&T replaced Lumen in the top spot at the end of last year.
Lumen, Spectrum Enterprise, Verizon, Comcast Business and Cox Business are the other providers at the top of the Leaderboard––in the same order since the year-end 2022 report. To be in this group, providers must have a 4% or more share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market.
The Leaderboard has two other tiers: Challenge and Market Player. Altice USA, Cogent (including Sprint assets), Frontier, GTT, Windstream and Zayo (in alphabetical order) are in the Challenge tier, which means they each have a market share between 1% to 4%.
Overall, according to VSG, Ethernet port growth was up, but could change in the near future.
“DIA connectivity for cloud computing and SD-WAN/SASE networks lifted U.S. Ethernet port growth in the first half of 2023,” VSG Principal and Co-founder Rick Malone, said. “However, despite the resiliency of the Ethernet market, several providers are preparing for port reductions in the future as customers opt for alternative service technologies.”
Here are other highlights from the report:
- Dedicated Internet/Cloud Access (DIA) accounted for the most new Ethernet service installations in the first half of the year. DIA was driven by ongoing enterprise migration to cloud services, managed SD-WAN, secure access service edge (SASE) and hybrid WANs.
- Ethernet access to VPN installations is declining as MPLS customers transition to SD-WANs.
- Demand for 100+ Gbps Ethernet connectivity is evolving as customers upgrade from lower-speed Ethernet services. Customers also are considering wavelength or dark fiber service alternatives.
- Ethernet service providers have seen supply chain challenges ease.
- AT&T, Lumen and Verizon have MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet (CE) certification. This certification means that a provider can support MEF 3.0 standard services, technologies and APIs.
The Market Player tier includes all providers in the sector that have port shares below 1%. Some of the companies in this sector include: ACD, Alaska Communications, Altafiber, BT Global Services, Centracom, Intelsat, Logix Fiber Networks, NTT, Silver Star Telecom, TDS Telecom, US Signal, WOW!Business and Ziply Fiber.