Enterprise wireless LAN sales jump 26% in Q2 2012

The wireless local area network (LAN) market is growing, with companies still investing in infrastructure, despite the economic climate.

Networking and telecoms research organisation, the Dell’Oro group, reported sales for wireless LAN (WLAN) products rising 16% year-on-year during the second quarter of 2012.

This figure went up to 26% when just enterprise WLAN solutions were taken into account.

Dell’Oro group said nine of the major WLAN suppliers all reported record revenues for Q2 2012. The analyst firm said there had been an overall boost for the industry, but trends such as bring your own device (BYOD) had made a major impact on encouraging sales.

Chris DePuy, WLAN research analyst at the Dell’Oro Group, said: “There are many exciting changes underway in the wireless LAN industry now. We have a new generation of technology shipping with 802.11ac, a new customer group emerging in service providers and new architectures being brought to market – cloud services and virtualised software.

“Enterprises now consider WLAN infrastructure systems to be just as important as their wired Ethernet systems, which is driving a need for combined management systems for wired and wireless access at the edge of the enterprise.”

Cisco continued to dominate the enterprise market, holding onto the majority share, but for the small or home office worker, Netgear remained the number one vendor to go to.

It was much more tightly fought in the service provider market, however, with HP, Ruckus Wireless and Cisco all within 0.2% revenue shares of one another.