Home networking and government stimulus programs are two of the hottest drivers of network equipment sales these days, according to analyst firms.
If you read their reports, you would probably determine that bad economic times are behind us. Last week, the Dell’Oro Group said that there were supply shortages holding back sales of Wi-Fi equipment. Shortages – as in, demand for the devices is so great that vendors are not able to ship enough of them! Dell’Oro says that Aruba, Cisco, D-Link and Netgear sales have all been affected by component shortages, such as those in high-speed memory chipsets.
Further, the analyst firm states that the biggest impact on sales was in the area of enterprise-class products. Products targeting small offices or home offices were also affected, but to a lesser degree.
And what’s behind the high demand? “US government stimulus programs are turning into sales orders faster than people expected,” the firm writes.
Dell’Oro says that sales of Wi-Fi gear were flat, quarter to quarter, at just under $1 billion. If it hadn’t been for the shortages, the group estimates that sales would have risen about 5%.
Meanwhile, In-Stat took a look at home networking technologies, and projected that installed home networks will surpass 300 million households worldwide in 2011. By 2013, nearly 90 million will have Gigabit Ethernet.
The analyst firm also noted that Wi-Fi networks in homes will outnumber 10/100 Ethernet networks by the end of this year, with the Asia/Pacific region leading in Wi-Fi home networks by 2012.
