* A couple of blows to WLANs
A couple of recent events have pointed to doom and gloom for wireless LANs, which last year had been the hottest thing in networking since ATM. However, it’s possible to read too much into the bad news.
Dell’Oro Group this week issued a report stating that the market for enterprise WLANs contracted 6% in the first quarter of this year. This is actually the second quarter in a row of the market’s decline, the research firm says.
Then there was the news last week that Verizon would be tearing down hundreds of WLAN hot spots that it had built in New York City a couple of years ago:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/050905-verizon.html
Observers were quick to say that public Wi-Fi access is a niche application and that no one is going to make money on it. That might be true – and perhaps that’s why city governments are getting into the game to provide public access for their citizens.
As for Dell’Oro, it’s important to note that the 6% decline was for enterprise gear only. The small office-home office market for WLAN gear still grew at 3%, helping the overall WLAN market to stick to just a 1% loss.
Dell’Oro says the enterprise decline was caused by Cisco announcing that it would acquire WLAN vendor Airespace in January, and by Nortel and Alcatel moving their enterprise WLAN offerings away from Airespace and toward Trapeze Networks and Aruba Networks.
With all the musical chairs going on among enterprise WLAN vendors, users are holding off on purchases.
Still, both of these admittedly unrelated news items point to the fact that the irrational exuberance that surrounded the technology in its early days has worn off.
