Routers are the engines of the Internet. Ever since the advent of that magical mother of networks, routers have helped companies access a growing library of information and add their own information to it through hosting. The phenomenon, a global one, has been applicable to India as well. Although local hosting has not yet picked up on a large scale, benefits of the Internet are being accrued by both large enterprises as well as SMEs. Contrary to the scenario five years ago, when only top executives of companies had access to the Net, many companies today provide Net access to all their employees. That being so, the growth of the router market has been tremendous in India.

Routers have been penetrating the Indian market consistently and rapidly. First came the initial rush to connect branches by the multinationals and leading companies of India—routers being used to control the WANs. Then came the Internet explosion in 1998–99. Hundreds of companies signed up to provide Internet services. Out of them, a hundred or so managed to put up a network. It was a windfall for router companies, especially for the router king Cisco, which soon emerged as the largest networking vendor of India, courtesy its router performance. Even though there has been a slowdown in the ISP market, the router growth is expected to be quite good in the current fiscal as well. For the last two years, it is the financial sector that has been generating much of the demand. In particular, Indian banks have discovered the value of connectivity, and are aggressively connecting their branches by satellite or leased lines.

Cisco is the market leader as far as routers are concerned. It leads the market by a huge margin, controlling about 80 percent of the Indian market. Other notable players, who are trying to eat into Cisco’s share, include Nortel, Zyxel, and Eicon.