LightCounting

LightCounting is a market research service based in Eugene, Oregon, in the United States, covering optical communications and data centre interconnect markets. The firm, formally LightCounting LLC, specialises in the optical transceivers, components and modules that carry data inside data centres, between data centres and across telecommunications networks. Its syndicated forecasts, sales reports and news releases are widely used by telecom and data communications trade media, because the markets it tracks are technical, fast-moving and largely invisible to the general public, yet central to cloud computing, broadband access and, more recently, artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Overview and specialisation

LightCounting describes its research as covering the whole supply chain, from optical and semiconductor components to modules and subsystems and their application in telecom and datacom systems. In practice that means following the small pluggable devices, known as optical transceivers, that convert electrical signals into light and back again at the ends of fibre optic cables, together with active optical cables, optical interconnects and related components. A single data centre may use enormous quantities of these parts, and choices about their speed, format and cost shape the economics of the networks built by cloud companies and telecommunications carriers.

The firm is privately held and headquartered in Eugene, Oregon, and it has also maintained a presence in Silicon Valley, California, closer to many of the component companies and system vendors it follows. Directory listings have put its headquarters address on West Park Street in Eugene. Its small analyst team has been presented for years as a group of specialists with extensive industry experience, rather than as generalist technology consultants, and its reputation rests on maintaining confidential sales data supplied by leading transceiver vendors and turning that data into market sizes and forecasts the industry can plan against.

Founder and leadership

LightCounting was founded by Dr. Vladimir Kozlov, who serves as its chief executive officer and chief analyst. Kozlov has been the public voice of the firm throughout its history, authoring or presenting its forecasts, commenting on quarterly results in its news releases and leading webinars on the state of the optical communications industry. In a 2012 webinar announcement, for example, Kozlov was scheduled to present the state of the telecom market in terms of equipment, component and module sales, discuss changes to the firm's forecast for 2013 to 2017 and share highlights from the China International Optoelectronic Exposition.

Other analysts named in the firm's releases over the years have included Dr. Roy Rubenstein, who served as director of research, and Dale Murray, a principal analyst who presented datacom market material alongside Kozlov. Accounts of the firm's founding differ slightly between directories, with some giving 2003 and others 2005 as the starting year; what is consistent across sources is that LightCounting was established in the early to mid-2000s, before the modern cloud data centre build-out, and that it built its position first in optical transceiver market measurement, describing itself in that period as the premier transceiver research company.

Research method

The firm's method has remained recognisably consistent. Its reports present historical sales data and detailed forecasts sorted into many product categories, based on a combination of publicly available information and confidential data provided by leading module and component vendors. Early releases described data from more than 25 leading transceiver vendors sharing confidential sales figures; later descriptions referred to more than 20 or more than 30 vendors depending on the report and period. That vendor cooperation is the foundation of the service, because individual companies know their own shipments but not the full market, while customers and investors need totals by technology, speed and application.

LightCounting organises the market by application and technology, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SONET and SDH, CWDM and DWDM, fibre to the home and access networks, wireless infrastructure, high-performance computing and data centre interconnects. Its forecast reports have broken the market into more than 100 product categories, covering formats such as SFP, XFP, QSFP, CFP and CXP modules and speeds from 10 gigabits per second through 40 and 100 gigabits and beyond. As speeds have increased, the same framework has extended to 400-gigabit, 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit products, silicon photonics, linear pluggable optics and co-packaged optics.

Early reports and market cycles

The firm's news releases from its first decade show both its style and the cyclicality of the market it covers. In December 2007 LightCounting reported that sales of optical transceivers had reached a record $526 million in the third quarter of that year and were likely to exceed $560 million in the fourth quarter, with growth driven by DWDM modules and SONET and SDH transceivers, each up 24 percent. Kozlov noted that manufacturers had shipped close to 30 million modules in the first three quarters of 2007 and that vendors were ramping production of newer high-speed, small form factor modules. The same release also observed that profitability remained a challenge as customer bases consolidated.

In September 2008 the firm's Transceiver Market Forecast projected that Ethernet and DWDM would drive the market from 2008 to 2011, that low-cost 10-gigabit SFP+ modules would dominate data communications and that fibre access would become more significant as GPON and next-generation passive optical networks gained prominence. It forecast a 37 percent compound annual growth rate for 10-gigabit Ethernet optical transceiver shipments over that period. A 2009 release forecast that global sales of optical transceivers would exceed $2 billion that year, and a 2012 forecast report analysed the business and capital expenditure of the top 12 service providers alongside trends for networking equipment and component suppliers, projecting the component market through 2016. Read together, the releases document a firm tracking the transition from telecom-led optical markets toward the data centre-led markets that would later dominate.

Coverage areas

LightCounting's catalogue has included transceiver sales reports, market forecasts, high-speed Ethernet optics reports, optical interconnect and active optical cable research, and state of the industry reports, typically updated on quarterly, semiannual or annual cycles. Its topic coverage has included high-speed interconnects for datacom, telecommunications and consumer communications, as well as CATV and fibre to the home markets in earlier periods. For telecom trade readers, the headline numbers from these reports, growth rates, market sizes and expected turning points, become news in themselves, and outlets such as Lightwave have regularly reported LightCounting findings as industry stories.

The firm also comments on supplier strategy. Its analysts have written about leading transceiver players moving into acquisition mode to increase scale, margins and vertical integration, and about the dual challenge suppliers face from demanding new opportunities at higher speeds and continuous cost pressure from operators and equipment vendors. That attention to business structure distinguishes the service from a purely technical publication: it follows photons and packets, but it reports them as revenues, market shares and investment decisions.

The artificial intelligence era

From 2023 onward, LightCounting's coverage has been dominated by a new driver: artificial intelligence clusters. As cloud companies and AI firms built very large GPU clusters, demand for optical connectivity inside those clusters created what the firm described as a new multi-billion-dollar segment of the transceiver market. LightCounting reported that sales of transceivers for AI clusters exceeded $4 billion in 2024, up from $2 billion in 2023 and less than $1 billion in 2022. It forecast that the overall transceiver market would expand at a 15 percent compound annual growth rate over the following five years after a 6 percent decline in 2023, with Ethernet transceiver sales projected to ramp by about 40 percent in 2024 and active optical cable sales by about 25 percent, while fibre access and wireless fronthaul optics recovered more slowly.

Subsequent updates raised those expectations. The firm reported that Ethernet optical transceiver sales roughly doubled in 2024 and grew strongly again in 2025, and by early 2026 it estimated that sales of Ethernet transceivers and co-packaged optics for AI clusters had reached $16.5 billion in 2025, with a path toward about $26 billion in 2026. In comments reported in 2026, Kozlov said the data centre pluggable optics market reached $15.5 billion in 2025 and was projected to grow at a 17 percent compound annual rate from 2025 through 2030, surpassing $34 billion, with co-packaged optics contributing more than $9 billion by 2030 and silicon photonics modulators rising from 43 percent of transceivers in 2025 to a projected 76 percent by 2030.

At the same time, LightCounting has repeatedly cautioned against assuming uninterrupted growth. Its Ethernet optics reporting noted that the market could have grown even faster in 2025 if InP chip suppliers had more capacity, that shortages of EML and CW laser chips could limit growth until the end of 2026, and that its forecast assumed a soft landing while acknowledging that supply chain equilibrium in this market has often been restored by a correction instead. It has also urged a sober look at what is driving AI investment. That habit of pairing record figures with warnings about bottlenecks and cycles is characteristic of the firm and is one reason its releases are treated as analysis rather than promotion.

How the service is used

LightCounting's customers include component and module vendors deciding on capacity and product roadmaps, system companies planning data centre and network products, service providers and cloud operators assessing supply and pricing, and investors following the optical supply chain. Its public news releases serve a second audience of trade journalists and industry readers who need a defensible market size or growth rate. When a publication reports that hyperscaler demand will drive transceiver growth, or that AI applications will dominate the Ethernet transceiver market between 2026 and 2030, it is often summarising a LightCounting report.

The firm supports this role with webinars, conference-related commentary and regular forecast updates, in addition to the paid reports themselves. Its older webinar programmes covered telecom and datacom equipment, component and module sales and deployment of higher-speed Ethernet in data centres, subjects that remain at the centre of its work even as the speeds and the buyers have changed.

Significance

LightCounting matters because modern digital infrastructure depends on components that few outside the industry ever see. Every increase in cloud capacity, video traffic or AI training compute requires more connections, and those connections increasingly run over fibre with optical transceivers at each end. A research firm that can say, with vendor-reported data behind it, how large that market is, which segments are growing and where shortages are forming provides information that shapes real spending decisions.

Based in Eugene, Oregon, LightCounting has held that position from the era of SONET and 10-gigabit Ethernet through the hyperscale cloud build-out and into the AI data centre expansion. Its longevity across several market cycles, including the declines it has documented as well as the booms, is the basis of its standing as a reference source for telecom trade media and for the optical communications industry itself.