Louisiana-based CenturyLink came top of the 2017 board, in part because of an increased number of Ethernet ports due to its $34 billion merger with Level 3 Communications, completed last year. Prior to this, AT&T was top.
Verizon - including its ports from its acquisition of XO – came in third position, followed by Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast, Windstream, and Cox, who made up the seven-strong leaderboard released by Vertical Systems for the first six months of 2018.
To qualify for the leaderboard, providers must have at least 4% of all the US Ethernet services market, with the share measured by the number of customer ports in service.
Those who don’t meet the 4% criteria fall into other tiers, such as the Challenger tier, which accounts for providers with between 1% and 4% of the total market. Altice USA, Cogent, Frontier, GTT, Sprint and Zayo made up this tier (in alphabetical order).
The tier below this, which Vertical Systems calls the Market Player tier, includes all providers with a port share below the 1% threshold. It includes numerous wholesale players, including the likes of Global Cloud Xchange, NTT America, Tata, Telstra and Vodafone.
“After a flurry of M&A activity during the past two years, the Ethernet marketplace stabilized during the first half of 2018,” said Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group.
“U.S. port growth was more than 6% for the period, with accelerating deployments of multi-gigabit speed services. Most providers experienced acute price compression across all data rates, partially offsetting the revenue typically generated from higher speed services. All providers are grappling with longer sales cycles due to SD-WAN, however the impact on the U.S. Ethernet base has been negligible to date.”
