The market for carrier Ethernet equipment is experiencing a “shake-up,” according to Infonetics Research—one that could shuffle the positions of competing vendors but won’t disturb that of the market’s leader, Cisco Systems.

While Cisco dominated the market last year, its 7600 product line taking nearly half the $183-million global market for carrier Ethernet gear, competing vendors may trade places in the market in 2005, Infonetics said. Riverstone Networks was the second-place marketshare holder last year and Alcatel was in third place, said Infonetics principal analyst Michael Howard.

“Riverstone’s been pretty steady,” he said. “Alcatel’s been growing fast with its 7750, and Atrica’s been growing fast, especially with their relationship with Fujitsu. Siemens has also been growing fast.”

Fujitsu Network Communications claims to have shipped more than 250 nodes of Atrica’s optical Ethernet gear to seven customers so far, including Cox Communications, which in January announced it had completed deployment of the gear for a triple-play network linking New Orleans public schools.

Fujitsu also resells carrier Ethernet gear from Adva Optical Networking but markets Atrica’s gear mainly toward greenfield applications while it focuses Adva’s FSP 150 line (rebranded the Flashwave 5150 line) mainly on inclusion in existing networks.

Last week, Alcatel announced that British Telecom had deployed its 7750 Service Router platform to launch an Ethernet virtual local area network service that will be available across the United Kingdom within the coming year, in 2-Mb/s increments scaling up to 1 Gb/s.

Last month Riverstone introduced two new carrier Ethernet routers—the 15100 and the 10-Gb/s 15200—which both bring MPLS from the core to the edge of carrier networks. This month, the vendor announced that system integrator Dynavar Networking would resell Riverstone’s gear to competitive local exchange carriers and independent operating companies in North America.

Last week, Cisco unveiled new carrier Ethernet gear of its own, including a new access switch.

“Cisco’s going to stay ahead, but these other significant players are jockeying,” Howard said.

Infonetics, which defines the carrier Ethernet market in accordance with the Metro Ethernet Forum’s definition of carrier Ethernet equipment (but includes more than just MEF-certified gear) projects the carrier Ethernet market to grow to $2.6 billion in 2008, representing about a third of the overall metro Ethernet equipment market.