IDC: The global WLAN market will grow 5.8% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter of 2024

The enterprise global wireless local area network (WLAN) market grew 5.8% between the second and third quarters of 2024 to reach $2.5 billion, according to results from the IDC Worldwide Quarterly WLAN Tracker.

The sequential growth in the third quarter follows a 12.4% increase in the first and second quarters of 2024. This continued growth suggests that market supply and demand dynamics are stabilizing after two years of volatility, mainly due to the reduction of backlogged products caused by the Covid-19 global supply chain crisis. The enterprise WLAN market fell 1.7% year-over-year, with revenue growth in 2023 compared to 17.5% in the first three quarters of this year.

The latest Wi-Fi standards are steadily gaining traction in the enterprise WLAN market. Wi-Fi 6E, which enables Wi-Fi to utilize the unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum band, accounted for 31.7% of the AP market revenue in the third quarter. This compares to 20.4% in the same period last year. Wi-Fi 7 is also beginning to be adopted, accounting for 4.9% of the AP segment revenue, while most of the remaining APs continue to use Wi-Fi 6 technology.

In the United States, the enterprise WLAN market declined 3.2% year-over-year, but grew 10.7% sequentially from 2Q24 to 3Q24. The Western European market showed modest growth, increasing 0.2% year-over-year and 4.2% sequentially. In Central and Eastern Europe, the market grew 0.5% year-over-year and 7.8% sequentially. In Asia Pacific (excluding Japan and China), the market declined 4.4% year-over-year and 3.5% sequentially. In China, the market declined 10.2% year-over-year, but rose 2.2% sequentially.

Cisco's enterprise wireless LAN revenues fell 5.7% year over year but increased 11.0% quarter over quarter to $1.0 billion, accounting for 41.6% of the market at the end of the third quarter.

HP Aruba Networks' third quarter revenue increased 23.9% year-over-year and 8.2% quarter-over-quarter, with market share of 15.1% this quarter.

Ubiquiti's enterprise WLAN revenue increased 27.5% year-over-year and 9.0% quarter-over-quarter, with a market share of 8.3%.

Huawei's enterprise WLAN revenue fell 1.8% year-on-year and 20.5% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter, with a market share of 7.2%.

Juniper Networks' enterprise WLAN revenue grew 17.6% year-over-year and 11.6% quarter-over-quarter, with a market share of 5.3%.