Overall wireless LAN market revenues are forecast to approach $12 billion in 2017, well more than 50 percent greater than 2012 revenues, according to research firm Dell’Oro Group. The key trends expected to drive this growth include deployment of service provider Wi-Fi, the 802.11ac upgrade cycle and cloud-managed WLAN; with additional influence coming from consumer video over WiFi, and the bring your own device trend.
“Enterprises now see wireless LAN access as critical, yet historically have installed wireless as an overlay network that is separate from the Ethernet network,” said Chris DePuy, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “As new, higher-speed 802.11ac wireless systems are installed, we expect a growing number of companies will be re-considering the interaction between Ethernet edge switches and enterprise WLAN devices. This provides both opportunity and risk for Enterprise Edge vendors.”
