According to a recent forecast by Dell'Oro Group, coherent port shipments on DWDM systems will reach 1.3 million by 2024. The driving force behind a majority of those shipments will be ports that operate at 400G.
"We are projecting coherent port shipments on DWDM systems to grow at an 18% CAGR,” said Jimmy Yu, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, in a statement. “Further igniting this market will be all the new, higher baud rate coherent line cards entering the market this year that will set the path for many more years of growth.
"On a capacity shipment basis, we think the highest share of coherent line cards will be operating at 400 Gbps, a wavelength speed that will have the perfect balance of capacity, performance, and price in both metro and long haul networks."
According to Yu, the top vendors in 2019, which accounted for less than 80% of the combined share, were Huawei, Ciena, ZTE, Nokia, and Infinera.
Cisco, Juniper Networks and Arista Networks, among other vendors, previously said on last year's earnings calls that they expect 400G gear start to finding market traction this year.
RELATED: AT&T fires up 400G optical connection between Dallas and Atlanta
On the service provider front, AT&T announced in November that it had fired up 400G an optical connection carrying live traffic between Dallas and Atlanta by working with Ciena. With a plan in place to have 5G available nationwide the first half of next year, AT&T plans to start deploying 400G across its network in 2020. AT&T has been plotting its move to 400G for some time, and has been installing a large portion of the optical network equipment over the last year in preparation for wider deployments of 400G. That equipment can be upgraded to 400G by using software.
RELATED: Coherent DWDM revenue to hit $16B by 2023 - report
Driven by 200 Gbps wavelength shipments, coherent DWDM revenue will reach $16 billion by 2023, according to a Dell'Oro Group report in July. Dell'Oro Group's July report said that 200 Gbps wavelengths would comprise the highest share of shipments over three years by growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50%.
In its optical transport five-year report, Dell'Oro said on Monday that that the total optical transport market consisting of multi-service multiplexers and WDM systems was forecast to reach nearly $18 billion in four years. The deployment of WDM systems in metro applications is projected to drive over half of the WDM market over the next five years.