Skip to main content

Increased Role for Wi-Fi in the Digital Home

Wi-Fi's existing large installed base in mobile PCs and home networks means that it is likely to be a primary connectivity solution for new consumer electronics (CE) devices, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.

Attach rates for Wi-Fi among game consoles are already approaching 80 percent. In-Stat expects DTV to be another high volume driver, reaching nearly 21 million units shipped with Wi-Fi by 2012.

While growth rates and penetration of Wi-Fi in the living room is growing, Wi-Fi is still dominated by the huge volume of mobile Wi-Fi devices.

Beyond the already established notebook PC segment, Portable Media Players shipped with Wi-Fi will grow to well over 100 million units in 2011 and cellular/Wi-Fi handsets will pass 300 million units by 2012.

"Finalization of IEEE 802.11n will remedy some of the technical issues that constrained Wi-Fi adoption in video-centric CE devices," says Victoria Fodale, In-Stat analyst. "We expect the adoption of Wi-Fi in the living room to accelerate. However, mobile device shipments will still outnumber stationary CE devices by nearly ten to one."

In-Stat market study found the following:

- By 2012, shipments of CE devices with Wi-Fi are expected to reach more than 938 million.

- There were over 87 million wireless networks in the home in 2007.

- Residential gateways are expected to show the strongest growth among Wi-Fi home aggregator devices, which include SOHO/home routers, residential gateways, and standalone access points (APs).

Popular posts from this blog

Why Every Tech Vendor Needs a Real AI Story

Every product roadmap conversation with a technology vendor now runs through one filter that has nothing to do with the roadmap itself: does the company have an AI story that a buyer's finance team would actually underwrite. Forrester Research just gave that gut check a formal structure. Its newly introduced AI Disruption Model evaluates 17 technology and service categories, spanning more than 200 individual markets, against nine factors including AI substitutability, labor intensity, and switching costs. The finding that should reorder tech vendor strategy conversations this quarter is not which markets grow. It is how few of them do, and what that scarcity means for everyone else. Only Three Categories Get an Unambiguous Green Light According to the research, infrastructure providers such as cloud platforms, data centers, and storage; data and AI providers spanning models, platforms, and governance tooling; and cybersecurity and identity providers covering zero trust and AI agent...