Skip to main content

Growth of Consumer Electronics Wi-Fi Enabled Devices

The quest for connectivity continues to drive Consumer Electronics (CE) manufacturers to enable their products with Wi-Fi wireless technology -- both for incremental home networking applications and ongoing access to public hotspots while mobile.

The next 5 years will see an increase in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, from over 500 million in 2009 to nearly 2 billion in 2014, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.

Devices leading the pace of adoption include Blu-ray disc players and recorders, e-readers, digital televisions with built-in IP connectivity and low-cost IP video set-top boxes -- such as the Roku digital video player.

"The reality of 802.11n-enabled devices being available is that many of the technical issues that constrained Wi-Fi adoption in video-centric CE devices in the past have been remedied," says Frank Dickson, Vice President of Research.

"As a result, we expect the adoption of Wi-Fi in the living room to accelerate. Across all 'digital living room' consumer electronics, which includes set-top boxes, game consoles, and other such devices, Wi-Fi-enabled devices will exceed 200 million units by 2014."

In-Stat's market study findings include the following:

- Mobile devices with Wi-Fi will still dominate shipments. In 2013, shipments of mobile phones with embedded Wi-Fi are projected to exceed three-quarters of a billion units.

- E-readers Wi-Fi attach rates will increase from 3 percent in 2009 to 88 percent by 2014.

- 29 million digital picture frames will be shipped in 2014 -- 53 percent will be Wi-Fi-enabled.

Popular posts from this blog

The Billions Bet on Tentative AI Demand

Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....