We love WLAN, say consumers

Business interest in wireless LAN equipment continues to grow, although corporate investments in the technology still lag far behind consumer spending.

In the first six months of this year spending on WLAN equipment hit $1.2bn in Western Europe, according to IDC research.

The residential market accounts for 80 per cent of European sales, and in the first half of this year grew 22 per cent compared to the second half of 2005. Around 6.6 million wireless routers or gateways were sold to the consumer market.

In contrast, revenue for enterprise wireless infrastructure equipment increased by 14 per cent in the same period.

Business demand for centralised WLAN architecture technology in particular continued to grow, with revenues jumping 48 per cent, whereas revenue for decentralised architecture products fell 16 per cent.

Cisco continues to be the most important player, followed at a distance by 3Com, the analyst house said.

ZyXEL also became more active in the enterprise market and improved its market position from fifth to third position with a revenue share of 13 per cent, according to IDC.

IDC senior research analyst Evelien Wiggers said that while Cisco has been dominating the enterprise segment for years, vendor positions in the consumer market tend to vary much more because in the consumer space vendors have agreements with ISPs and so their success is connected with the ISPs' success in expanding the number of broadband connections.