Cisco stood its ground last year as top dog in the worldwide WLAN market, staying comfortably ahead of rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Aruba, Ubiquiti, and Huawei, according to a new report from IDC. 

Cisco ended the year holding 40.5% of the market’s revenues, which while down from the 42.7% it controlled in 2020, was more than three-times what its next largest rival managed in 2021. Cisco’s market strength was further bolstered by a 14.2% increase in segment revenues last year.

HPE-Aruba managed a distant second in the market last year, scoring 12.8% of the market. That haul was down from the 13.5% share it secured in 2020, but the vendor nearly matched Cisco’s year-over-year segment revenue gain.

Ubiquiti, Huawei, and H3C rounded out the market’s top five spots, with year-over-year revenue increases all around. Huawei and H3C were the only two on IDC’s list able to increase their market share from the year prior, though only by small margins.

The IDC Worldwide Quarterly WLAN Tracker provides total market size and vendor share data spanning nine major regions and 60 countries. Measurement for the WLAN market – segmented by product class, product type, product, standard, and location – is provided in vendor revenue, value, and unit shipments.

The enterprise market drove segment growth last year, with total segment revenues increasing more than 20% to $7.6 billion. IDC noted this growth was driven by the latest WiFi 6 standard that accounted for more than 75% of access point revenues and 61% of shipments. Legacy WiFi 5 products made up the remaining balance.  

"The enterprise segment of the WLAN market continued its steady rebound in the final quarter of 2021, leading to a significant full-year growth rate for the industry in 2021," Brandon Butler, research manager for Network Infrastructure at IDC, noted in the report. 

Conversely, the consumer market fell 2.5% last year, which IDC attributed to a tough comparison as 2020 revenues spiked due to a rapidly changing work environment driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. The research firm explained that compared to 2019, last year’s consumer numbers increased 12.6% “indicating that the market's fundamentals remain strong.”

"The enterprise WLAN market is maintaining its healthy growth rates compared to 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was peaking, indicating that organizations have resumed their wireless network infrastructure spending," added Petr Jirovsky, research director for Worldwide Networking Trackers at IDC. 

The combined enterprise and consumer markets experienced a 6.5% growth rate, totaling $17.2 billion for the calendar year.

China was the market’s strongest growth region, posting a more than 47% year-over-year increase in sales revenue. The Asia-Pacific region excluding China and Japan experienced 16% market growth for the full year. 

Latin America led the rest of the world with revenues increasing 33% last year, followed by Western Europe (22.9%), Central and Eastern Europe (10.6%), and the Middle East and Africa (6.6%). The United States market grew 14.6% last year, while Canada increased 11%.