Networking trends 2025

Ethernet recently celebrated its 50th anniversary as the most widely deployed technology for enterprise network connectivity.

Ethernet switches: 2024 was a difficult year for Ethernet Campus Switch sales, with a 20 percent contraction compared to record revenues in 2023. The market is expected to rebound in 2025 and beyond, fueled by refresh cycles and Wi-Fi 7 deployments. Enterprise AI adoption can also give some positive lift for the Ethernet Campus Switch market. The combined shipments of 2.5, 5 and 10 Gbps campus switch ports will grow by over 150% between 2022 and 2027, fueled by increasing traffic on the LAN and higher-capacity access points (AP).

2024 was a banner year for Ethernet. a href=”https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/next-gen-ethernet-standards-set-move-forward-2025-hector-cardenas-ro2nc”>One of the most significant developments in 2024 was the maturation of 800 Gigabit Ethernet (800GbE) (IEEE P802.3df). The development will continue in 2025. Next-Gen Ethernet Standards Set to Move Forward in 2025. It is expected that Ethernet accelerates beyond 1 Terabit, better optical connections, and optimization for AI and HPC workloads are on the way. 200 Gigabits per second per lane allows that “1.6Tb Ethernet is being discussed in terms of the optics, the form factors and use cases, and we expect industry leaders to be trialing 1.6T systems towards the end of 2025.” In addition The industry has already begun to chart the path toward 3.2Tb and 400G/lane Ethernet. The demand for AI networks is accelerating the transition from 400G port speeds to 800G and beyond.

AI is coming to networks: AI is expected to spike investments in high-performance networking gear. Network hardware companies say that the path to an AI revolution begins with a high-performance network. Much of work for needs of AI/ML workloads occurred under the direction of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, which is an open-source effort under the governance of the Linux Foundation. AI will generate new levels of network traffic, new requirements for low latency, and new layers of complexity. The saving grace, for network operators, is AIOps – the use of AI to optimize and automate network processes. The competitive landscape is experiencing upheaval that could lead to an AI-driven three-horse race for networking superiority among Cisco ($54 billion in annual revenue), HPE ($30 billion) and Broadcom ($51 billion). Cisco has acquired the AI analytics leader Splunk.

Single pair Ethernet: The Ethernet Alliance has produced the first Single Pair Ethernet plugfest to advance seamless interoperability for products and services designed for 10BASE-T1L applications based on the IEEE 802.3cg specification that was finalized in 2019.

Ultra Ethernet: 2025 will be a big year for UEC (Ultra Ethernet Consortium). AI networking and bulkier data center applications are sparking advancements in Ethernet-based communication technologies. “The fully integrated 1.0 specification, consolidating all drafts, is set to be released in early 2025,” Metz said. “Efforts are already underway to focus on compliance, performance enhancements, storage, and management solutions.” The release of the UEC spec will provide key enhancements to Ethernet for AI in both training and AGI environments that earlier used Infiniband.

Lead in AI networking: Given the unique requirements of AI workloads, packet loss of just 1% can translate to 33% lower performance—and a huge hit to return on investment (ROI). This is why data center operators have historically built xPU networking fabrics using lossless InfiniBand. Many operators, however, would prefer standardized, widely available Ethernet if it could meet AI networking requirements. Thanks to protocols like remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet version 2 (RoCEv2) and emerging industry specifications like Ultra-Ethernet Transport, now it can. The analyst predicts that HSE port shipments will increase by 50% compound annual growth rate through 2028 when Ethernet becomes the dominant AI network technology.

AI infrastructure: Another key trend at the intersection of networking and AI is that this year, many enterprises will start repatriating AI infrastructure out of the public cloud in favor of private and hybrid deployments. This change comes in response to mounting regulations governing AI data sovereignty, security, and privacy. This trend will open new opportunities for telecom, cloud, and networking companies to provide scalable, secure network infrastructure-as-a-service (NIaaS) solutions to these customers.

Mission critical: Recognizing the central role of IT networks in mission-critical industries like telecom, transportation, healthcare, and banking, governments and regulators are now issuing a wide range of new mandates and recommendations to improve operational resilience. Traditional service providers and large network operators have recently invested in network automation, seeking to reduce manual effort and errors, improve quality, and lower costs. In 2025, AI will become a “force multiplier” for these efforts, making network automation frameworks more intelligent and adaptive with new agentic AI technologies.

New optical module standard: RJ45 vs. SFP: Which network interface should you use? is the question that lower speed network admins ask. For very high speeds ever developing optical interfaces are the way to go. While perhaps not as exciting as high-speed Ethernet bandwidth, 2025 will also see the real world deployments of Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO). The LPO promises to remove heat-inducing and power-hungry digital signal processors (DSPs) used in traditional optical modules and provide a more cost-effective interconnect for shorter-reach applications. “Arista has talked about LPO for 800G earlier, but 2025 is the year when LPO will become real, with demonstrable power and cost savings”

Single-vendor SASE: As enterprises are expected to shift toward single-vendor SASE that can do all. SASE, defined by Gartner as a service offering that includes SD-WAN plus zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and network firewalling, requires vendors to combine multiple products into a single suite. The market is consolidating around six SASE vendors who have a combined 72% of the total market. Those six vendors are Zscaler, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom, Fortinet, and Netskope, according to Dell’Oro.

Virtulization: Network equipment providers, having lost a hardware role, offered virtualized but monolithic software packages that would often bundle applications with virtualization infrastructure in a “full stack.” More recently, the advocates have been demanding “cloud-native” products that break software down into smaller, reusable components. They also want the freedom to combine one company’s applications with someone else’s cloud infrastructure platform. IBM-owned Red Hat was unveiled as Nokia’s primary cloud partner. Ericsson shows absolutely no desire to follow Nokia down this path of further disaggregation and abandon its own network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) and cloud-native infrastructure solutions (CNIS) products.

The acquisition of Infinera will make Nokia the second-largest vendor in the optical networking market with a 20% share, behind Huawei, which is benefiting from the minimal presence of Western companies in China.

Wi-Fi popularity increases: In the early part of this decade, Wi-Fi traffic roughly quadrupled over a four-year period and it is now the most commonly used wireless communications technology. Last year, certified Wi-Fi 7 products burst onto the scene offer dramatic improvements in speed, capacity, and latency. Wi-Fi 7, the newest generation of wireless technology, promises to deliver the additional performance and lower latency modern enterprise apps need today. Wi-Fi 7 adoption is gaining momentum as new devices (e.g., chipsets, adapter cards, endpoint devices, routers, access points, etc.) reach the market. When you need more bandwidth or better coverage, consider investing to new access points, because Even the Best Wi-Fi Extender Isn’t Worth Your Time. Wi-Fi 7 Deployments Will Require Campus Switch Upgrades because Wi-Fi 7 Access Points draw twice as much power as Wi-Fi 6 and need more bandwidth in wires. Morgan predicts that by 2027, the percentage of wireless access points shipped to enterprises with multi-gig ports will rise to over 60% of the total APs shipped, almost double the rate of 2022.

HaLow: Wi-Fi HaLow provides energy-efficient, long-range, scalable Wi-Fi technology designed to to meet the needs of various IoT applications with to longer range and lower power connectivity than traditional Wi-Fi technologies. Wi-Fi HaLow is a wireless technology specification that is based on the IEEE 802.11ah protocol. It was first introduced in 2016 and runs on sub-1GHz frequencies (between 750 MHz and 928 MHz). It was designed to meets the requirements of the Internet of Things in a variety of use cases in industrial, agricultural, smart building and smart city environments. HaLow can support data rates between 150 kbps and 15 Mbit/s with lowest speed can support communications distance up to kilometers (3km in urban areas and 16km in rural areas). In USA HaLow works at 900 MHz band while in Europe the band spans from 863 to 868 MHz is used (some EU countries have authorized 915.8-919.4 recently). Quectel, Silex and Morse Micro are two companies most pushing HaLow technology forward to use. Morse Micro has developed the world’s first router that combines WiFi 4 (802.11n) with the long range HaLow standard and is planning a European version.