According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Wireless LAN Tracker, the Indian WLAN market had a YoY growth of 9.1% during 1Q22 majorly driven by the enterprise wireless segment. The market stood at USD 63.6 million (by Vendor Revenue).
WLAN segment witnessed a growth of 9.1% YoY in 1Q22. While the enterprise WLAN grew strongly with pent-up demand from organizations coming through, the consumer wireless demand softened with offices reopening in the country. Enterprise WLAN segment exhibited a very strong 38.5% YoY growth while consumer WLAN declined by 20.8% YoY. Cloud-managed wireless had a good uptake in India owing to ease of deployment and manageability.
Business in the enterprise wireless segment had a strong YoY growth of 38.5%. The services vertical, majorly characterized by IT/ITES, software majors, consulting, e-commerce, etc. had doubled its revenue share (in comparison with 1Q21). Key reasons were owing to hybrid work, regular refreshes, and pre-planning of infrastructure buying considering the current delays. Education vertical witnessed spending on wireless infrastructure after a long slumber caused due to COVID-19. Cloud managed wireless witnessed gathering traction owing to simpler deployment and management. The cloud managed portfolio was considered an effective alternative to the regular vendor portfolio of access points owing to the increasing delays in shipments.
With offices beginning to function in the hybrid mode, the consumer gateway routers declined by 20.8%. Wi-Fi 5 (AC) continued to dominate the consumer router segment followed by N. AX has started to pick up steam in the consumer segment with ISP and online channels. However, AX is still not mainstream and is used only in low latency use cases.
With a market share of 24.9%, TP-Link was the market leader in the WLAN segment during 1Q22. Within the enterprise class WLAN segment, Cisco was the market leader with 24.1% market share followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with 22.5%.
