The worldwide enterprise and service provider (SP) router market climbed to $3.6 billion in Q2 2025, a 12.5 percent year-over-year increase, according to IDC’s latest Quarterly Router Tracker. Demand from communication and cloud service providers, along with steady enterprise upgrades, fueled this robust performance.
Service Provider Segment Leads Expansion
Service providers — including telecom operators and cloud SPs — accounted for 73.2 percent of total router revenue, advancing 13.8 percent. The enterprise router segment also posted healthy momentum, rising 9.1 percent, reflecting ongoing investments in campus and branch networks to support AI-driven applications.
Regional Performance
Americas: Router revenue surged 24.5 percent, underscoring strong network upgrades and AI-related infrastructure deployments.
Asia Pacific: Grew 11.4 percent, driven by expanding broadband and cloud connectivity projects.
EMEA: Declined 1 percent, reflecting economic pressures and delayed network investments in some European markets.
Top Router Vendors: Q2 2025 Highlights
Cisco maintained its market leadership with 32.9 percent share, as router revenue grew 17.7 percent. The company’s broad portfolio and service provider focus continue to drive double-digit growth.
Huawei achieved 13.3 percent router revenue growth, capturing a 30.6 percent market share, supported by strong demand in Asia and select emerging markets.
Other global players leveraged cloud and 5G rollouts to sustain growth, though competitive dynamics remain intense as AI-era networking requirements accelerate.
Huawei has been expanding its router and WAN-edge portfolio with AI-driven and high-capacity solutions. At MWC 2025 the company introduced its AI WAN architecture for the Net5.5G era, built on three layers—AI routers, AI new connections, and an AI “new brain.” The routers provide millisecond-level flow reporting, high-accuracy flow identification, and integrated security engines, enabling carriers to detect under-utilized base stations, predict traffic congestion, and improve quality of experience for gaming and cloud broadband.
Huawei’s NetEngine 8000 F2C router delivers 7.2 Tbps forwarding capacity in a compact 2U design, supporting either 16×400GE or 72×100GE interfaces, while integrating functions such as segment routing (SR), broadband network gateway (BNG), provider edge (PE), and carrier-grade NAT (CGN). The platform is claimed to cut space requirements by about 70 percent and reduce power consumption roughly 40 percent versus comparable traditional routers.
Huawei is also targeting service providers and industry networks in Asia-Pacific with its Xinghe Intelligent WAN solution, which supports differentiated SLAs, real-time network visualization through a digital map, and advanced features like SRv6 and FlexE.
The company introduced the 5G AR enterprise router series with full SD-WAN capabilities and “super uplink” technology that boosts uplink speeds by 20–50 percent across 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. These efforts have driven strong market performance, with high-end router revenue rising about 23 percent year over year in Q1 2025.
Cisco is strengthening its router and WAN-edge offerings. The company rolled out a new generation of Secure Routers — models 8100 through 8500 — that combine SD-WAN, secure access service edge (SASE), next-generation firewall, and post-quantum security in single-box WAN solutions offering higher throughput than prior models.
Cisco expanded its Catalyst 5G industrial and edge routers, adding three ruggedized models and an IoT gateway line to extend SD-WAN and enterprise connectivity to mobile and remote environments. The Catalyst family itself has been broadened across the 8300 and 8500 lines to cover core, branch, and WAN-edge functions, providing a migration path for ISR and ASR customers seeking integrated routing, SD-WAN, security, and telemetry.
For carrier-grade deployments, Cisco upgraded the ASR 9000 series with new line cards and modular chassis options, including the ASR 9902 capable of about 800 Gbps and 4 Tb/s line cards with 400GE port support and MACsec encryption. Rising AI and cloud workloads are driving stronger demand for these router and WAN platforms, leading Cisco to raise its revenue outlook on the expectation of continued infrastructure growth.
There is increasing demand driven by AI and cloud workloads, which is pushing customers (enterprises, service providers) to upgrade routers / WAN infrastructure. Cisco raised its revenue forecast partly on account of expected growth in router / switch infrastructure demand, Reuters news report said.
Outlook
IDC expects the global router market to maintain steady expansion as AI workloads, 5G deployments, and cloud networking push service providers and enterprises to modernize backbone and edge infrastructure. Vendors with scalable, high-performance routing solutions — especially Cisco and Huawei — are well positioned to capture future opportunities.
Rajani Baburajan
