Revenues for all types of telecoms kit returned to growth last year, according to analyst firm Dell’Oro, with cloud providers leading the way.
Dell’Oro notes that total global telecoms kit revenues declined by 14% between 2022 and 2025 but that trend was interrupted last year, when they increased by 4%. While that didn’t even bring them back to 2023 levels, hopefully it will mark a long-term inflection point. Dell’Oro is forecasting growth for this year in the 2-4% range, so this is far from a boom, but positive news nonetheless.
The type of kit most responsible for revenue growth is, unsurprisingly, optical transport for data centre interconnect. In other words, the booming AI infrastructure business. For similar reasons, the high end router sector is also experiencing significant growth. Dell’Oro reports that ‘cloud providers’ contributed meaningfully to the overall growth of the telecom equipment market. On the mobile side, 5G SA upgrades drove healthy core network growth.
