802.11n enterprise WLAN to grow over ten-fold

REDWOOD CITY, USA: According to a recently published report from Dell'Oro Group, the 802.11n enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment revenue is expected to grow over 10 times the current revenue level and exceed $2.5 billion by 2013.

Mass adoption of 802.11n among specific vertical industries such as education and healthcare is expected to spur the enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) market to approach $4 billion by 2013.

“While we believe the education and healthcare vertical industries will remain leading adopters of wireless LAN technologies, we believe traditional office environments represent a larger market potential,” said Ben Kwan, Analyst of Wireless LAN research at Dell’Oro Group.

“Wireless LAN has been historically perceived in traditional office environments as just a basic data-access medium rather than a means to enhance operational efficiency. We believe the comparable speed of 802.11n to Fast Ethernet is one of the key factors helping change the perception of WLAN from a complementary to a primary network service in these environments. We project an increasing demand for 802.11n WLAN equipment to come from traditional office environments as the economy recovers,” added Kwan.

The report also indicates the enterprise WLAN market growth rate is expected to slow in 2009 before returning to a historical average of double-digit growth in 2010.