Today we share with you data on the further growth of wireless WLANs according to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC). The study shows the widespread increase of this type of network as a tool in everyday business.
The consumer and enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) market segments grew 4.5% in the first quarter of 2016 over the same period last year. According to a new IDC report, the enterprise segment grew by 8.6%, experiencing its best growth in more than a year.
The 802.11ac standard now accounts for almost 60% of the shipments of dependent access point units. Transfer rates can reach up to 1 Gbps in the 5 Ghz band with this standard. This allows operators to take better advantage of new bandwidths. 802.11ac is a reality today; the immediate future is the new 802.11ac wave 2 standard that enables a theoretical maximum wireless speed of 3.47 Gbps.
Growth by continents
The enterprise WLAN market once again saw its strongest growth rates in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan). This marks 19.7% growth in the first quarter. The North America region grew by 14%. While the Middle East and Africa grew by only 4.5% and Western Europe increased by only 2.7% in the same period.
Even so, these figures are better than those for Eastern and Central Europe and Japan, which decreased by 8.8% and 9.2%, respectively. The most significant decline was in Latin America, which fell by a significant 15.6%.
Petr Jirovsky, research manager at IDC attributes these figures by region to the economic context and states that “regional growth was more or less in line with the general economic security indicators”.
Market leaders
Cisco led the way in the quarter with a 2.7% year-over-year increase to 45.2% market share worldwide. IDC notes that the Meraki cloud-managed WLAN portfolio remains one of the main drivers of Cisco’s growth. Aruba-HPE came in second place, although shipments were down 2.3% this year, and finally, Ruckus achieved 21.3% growth over the period to reach third place with 7.7% of the market.
Meanwhile, WLAN home consumer market revenues were more moderate. This is because adoption of 802.11ac in the consumer market has been significantly slower than in the enterprise segment and represents only 18.4% of shipments and 46.1% of revenues in the consumer category.
At Esferize we encourage companies to implement wireless networks as a tool to facilitate their daily work. Furthermore, we hope to be able to help these figures to increase, providing solutions and the experience of our team of professionals.
