Market greedy for 'fat' Wi-Fi access points

Many assumptions about the Wi-Fi industry are 'myths', clams analyst

Many common assumptions about the development of the Wi-Fi industry in 2007 have been exposed as "myths", an analyst firm has claimed.

ABI Research believes it is incorrect to suggest that independent, or 'fat', access points are dead.

"These products are far from dead, and in fact still represented a third of all access points shipped in 2007," said ABI vice president and research director Stan Schatt.

Schatt believes that more intelligent, more feature-rich independent access points designed specifically for the SMB market represent a threat to market leader Cisco.

This is because some of these products cross into the territory Cisco reserves for its own branded products and not for Linksys products.

A second Wi-Fi industry 'myth' is that enterprises are driving the equipment market.

Schatt explained that anyone attending this year's Interop trade show in Las Vegas would have assumed that enterprises were the chief recipient of Wi-Fi equipment. But the analyst disagrees.

"While news stories focus on large deployments of Wi-Fi equipment at companies such as General Electric and Coca-Cola, some 95 per cent of access point shipments in 2007 were to consumers and small businesses," he said.

Enterprise-grade Wi-Fi equipment offers far more features, including greater security, and commands a far higher price.

But Schatt pointed to the fact that revenue from enterprise purchases of Wi-Fi access points represented 32 per cent of all access point revenue in 2007.