According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications, security, networks, and data center industries, the optical transport equipment market grew 14% year-over-year in 2Q 2025. This high growth rate was primarily attributed to the rising demand for disaggregated WDM and data center interconnect.

“Following six quarters of soft sales in optical transport, it was great to see this market recover and post a strong double-digit growth rate,” said Jimmy Yu, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. “One area contributing to the strong growth for optical was the rising demand for disaggregated WDM, a concept that arose over a decade ago when both cloud providers and communication service providers wanted to have a more open, vendor-agnostic environment. One where a network operator had more choice in suppliers for transponders, optical line systems, and pluggable optics,” added Yu.

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Additional highlights from the "2Q 2025 Optical Transport Quarterly Report":

  • The Optical Transport market growth was due to higher year-over-year (Y/Y) revenue for both optical transport systems and ZR/ZR+ optical plugs for IPoDWDM. 
  • The Disaggregated WDM market outperformed expectations in the quarter, growing nearly 35% Y/Y due to strong demand across all of the individual technology segments: transponder units, optical line systems, and ZR/ZR+ optics for IPoDWDM.
  • Communication service provider spending returned to growth in the quarter, increasing slightly from the same period a year ago.
  • Cloud providers, once again, drove the vast majority of the optical revenue growth in the quarter: direct cloud provider purchases of WDM systems grew 60% Y/Y.
  • The top six vendors in the quarter, ranked by revenue share, were Huawei, Ciena, Nokia, ZTE, FiberHome, and Cisco.

About the Report

The Dell’Oro Group "Optical Transport Quarterly Report" offers complete, in-depth coverage of the market with tables covering manufacturers’ revenue, average selling prices, and unit shipments (by speed up to 1.6 Tbps). The report tracks DWDM long haul, WDM metro, multiservice multiplexers (SONET/SDH), data center interconnect (metro and long haul), disaggregated WDM systems, and IPoDWDM ZR/ZR+ Optics.