Although the global wireless LAN market contracted by about 15 percent in the first quarter of 2009, sales of 802.11n equipment – especially for the SOHO and enterprise markets – grew, making it the only “bright spot” in the WLAN market for the quarter, according to a recent report from Dell’Oro Group.

Considering that most enterprises and SMBs have put network infrastructure improvements on hold, due to the economic downturn, it’s not surprising that the overall WLAN market contracted.

What is surprising is that sales of 802.11n equipment grew in the first quarter. Some of this growth can no doubt be attributed to the increase in small and home-based businesses in the U.S., which has resulted from the recent mass layoffs and subsequent increase in the number of professionals out of work and looking for new opportunities.

Many of these entrepreneurs are investing in home networks, where the wireless router plays an essential role in enabling mobility throughout the home or office. According to the Dell’ (News - Alert)Oro report, “SOHO wireless router revenues outperformed all other markets as users opted to pay higher prices for the higher performance of 802.11n equipment.”

Meanwhile, enterprises and large companies continue to gravitate to fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and thus are investing in 802.11n equipment in order to, among other things, meet the in-building wireless connectivity needs of their employees.

The report finds that these and other trends are what drove 802.11n revenues to become majority within the wireless router category in 1Q.

“While 802.11n revenues increased in both the SOHO and enterprise wireless LAN segments in the first quarter, the sequential gain was more pronounced in the SOHO wireless router category,” said Ben Kwan, analyst of wireless LAN research at Dell’Oro Group, in a release. “During the first quarter, users opted to pay higher prices for the higher performance of 802.11n wireless routers, propelling 802.11n sales to become the majority of the market.”

Equipment makers D-Link (News - Alert) and NETGEAR benefited the most from this increased demand, he said.

The report also indicates that the Asia Pacific region outperformed the total market as a result of the growth in the region.

The report follows on another report from Dell’Oro, released in April, showing that WLAN solutions provider BelAir Networks ended 2008 with almost twice the market share of its nearest competitor in the Service Provider WLAN space. At the time the report was published, BelAir Networks had reportedly seen six consecutive quarters of growth, attributed mainly to its success in targeting major cable operators and telecom service providers.

Dell’Oro’s 1Q09 WLAN report is supported by another recent report from market research firm ABI Research showing that the global WLAN market “has grown tremendously in recent years” and that “Wi-Fi in particular has been successful because of its ease of deployment in both consumer and enterprise environments.” As the report points out, “it is neater to deploy wireless than run cables throughout the home, and Wi-Fi is much cheaper to deploy than wired networks in the business space.”

The ABI Research (News - Alert) report, “Wi-Fi Equipment Market Data,” which was released in March, predicts that global access point shipments will exceed 70 million by 2010, "of which an overwhelming 90 percent will be generated by the SOHO and consumer markets.”

In May, TMCnet’s Michael Dinan wrote about how D-Link’s “CAPTCHA” system – short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” – can help small business owners identify and root out actions caused by worms, viruses and Trojans, which very often can be introduced to a home network by way of a wireless router. The solution, which D-Link has integrated into its home and small office routers as an extra safety measure, is designed to detect whether responses are human or computer-generated. As such, it prevents malicious software from performing actions that degrade the quality of service on a network.

Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard

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