Vertical Systems: Mid-Year 2018 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD

Vertical Systems Group released its Mid-year 2018 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD listing the top seven carriers, in rank order based on retail port share, as follows: CenturyLink, AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast, Windstream and Cox.

To qualify for the LEADERBOARD, providers must have four percent (4%) or more of the U.S. Ethernet services market. Shares are measured by the number of customer ports in service as tracked by Vertical Systems Group, with input from surveys of Ethernet providers.

"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 percent 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."

Other providers selling Ethernet services in the U.S. are segmented into two tiers as measured by port share. The first or Challenge Tier includes providers with between 1% and 4% share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market. For Mid-Year 2018, the following companies attained a position in the Challenge Tier (in alphabetical order): Altice USA, Cogent, Frontier, GTT, Sprint and Zayo.