Telecom Lead Asia: Global revenue for carrier Wi-Fi
access points and controllers will reach $2.2 billion in 2017.
It will be equivalent to almost one-half of the
traditional enterprise or consumer/SoHo Wi-Fi segments in the same period.
Cisco, Ruckus Wireless, and Ericsson/BelAir are the top
players in the carrier Wi-Fi access points and controllers in 2011.
While carrier Wi-Fi is still in relative infancy today,
the drive by mobile operators to offload data traffic is providing a
significant boost to this segment of the market,” said Nick Marshall, principal
analyst, mobile networks.
The rollout of carrier Wi-Fi has been hampered up until
now by the lack of standards which make the process seamless and transparent
for the subscriber.
We believe that with standardization initiatives well
under way, like Hotspot 2.0 and the almost universal inclusion of Wi-Fi in
every smartphone, PC, and tablet being built today, carrier controlled Wi-Fi is
expected to see wide-scale adoption, especially in markets like North America,
Japan, and South Korea,” Marshall added.
Additionally, the use of increasingly sophisticated
connection managers, which aggressively seek out validated Wi-Fi access in
accordance with the service provider’s policies, will accelerate this trend.
Thanks to this trend, carrier Wi-Fi data traffic offloaded is expected to grow
to around 30 percent by 2017.
Carrier Wi-Fi is defined as Wi-Fi that is provided as a
service to mobile carrier customers, owned and operated directly or indirectly
by the carrier, e.g. a third party hotspot provider.