AT&T held fast to first position for a fourth consecutive year on Vertical Systems Group’s latest leaderboard for U.S. carrier-managed SD-WAN. The service provider was followed by Comcast Business, Hughes, and Verizon. 

The leaderboard looks at service providers that had 2% or more of the installed and billable carrier-managed SD-WAN customer sites in the U.S. at the end of last year. 

“The U.S. managed SD-WAN services market emerged from the pandemic in 2021 with solid growth in new site installations, driven by accelerated network transformations and more flexible solutions for customers,” Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group, said in the report.  

Five of the seven market-leading providers shuffled rankings on the 2021 board, with Comcast Business securing second – up from fourth the year prior. Hughes and Verizon were consequently each bumped down a position to third and fourth respectively.

Lumen advanced to fifth – up from sixth position – and Windstream dropped to sixth position from fifth, leaving Aryaka to round out the roster as the only other company to retain its 2020 spot. 

The position changes are evidence of intensifying competition within the market, according to Malone. 

The report noted AT&T, Comcast Business, Verizon, Lumen and Windstream have all earned MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Service Certifications. The certificate requires testing of service attributes, functions, and capabilities to the industry trade group’s standards. 

Vertical Systems Group defines a carrier-managed SD-WAN service as a carrier-grade offering for business customers managed by a network operator, and includes requirements like an SDN service architecture that provides dynamic optimization of traffic flows and a purpose-built SD-WAN appliance or CPE-hosted SD-WAN virtual network function (VNF) at each customer edge site. 

Nods to Other Market Players

TPx held eighth position in 2020 but was demoted from this year's leaderboard which only hosted seven spots. The company was instead awarded a “Challenge Tier” citation for 2021 along with Fusion Connect and MetTel. 

The Challenge Tier acknowledges service providers with between 1% and 2% share of U.S. carrier-managed SD-WAN sites.

Cisco, Fortinet, Versa and VMware were also mentioned in the report as the market’s primary technology suppliers.