By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Enterprise WLAN market jumps 16% in 2Q2025, Dell’Oro says
The enterprise Wi-Fi market is back with a vengeance following a couple of years of sluggish growth and supply constraints. The latest WLAN Quarterly Report from the analysts at Dell’Oro Group reveals 16% year-on-year growth for 2Q driven by a massive jump in Wi-Fi 7 sales. Dell’Oro analyst Siân Morgan says the Wi-Fi 7 adoption in the enterprise-class market market doubled from 13% to 26%. “This was a massive quarter for Wi-Fi 7. Some vendors chose to keep Wi-Fi 7 prices low to drive up uptake, and they’ve certainly succeeded,” she says. Dell’Oro says the top market share movers were Ubiquiti, growing by four percentage points year-over-year while CommScope/RUCKUS grew by 2 percentage points and Juniper by a single point.
Siân Morgan says a major trend is the bifurcation of the WLAN market into low-cost solutions for the cost-conscious enterprise (such as Ubiquiti) versus high-end vendors where a considerable portion of revenue comes from software licenses. She also points out that the recent Network-as-a-Service vendors (such as Meter and Nile) imply a financial cost, which means they cannot be grouped with the low-cost vendor segment. Looking ahead closed-loop automation using AI is something to keep an eye on, she says. “Some vendors are now talking about ‘human on the loop’ as opposed to being part of the loop, meaning that we’re getting closer to automating network decisions with AI,” Sian Morgan says.
For more about the Dell’Oro’s Wireless LAN Quarterly report read here.
Tokyo installs Passpoint-enabled public Wi-Fi hotspots in phone booths
If you’ve been to Tokyo you will know that there’s already a lot of public Wi-Fi across the giant city – but now the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is making sure there’s even more. In an announcement August 27, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government says it is partnering with NTT East to install public Wi-Fi into phone booths. The initiative will use the OpenRoaming (Passpoint) standard for secure and convenient connectivity.
Tokyo Governor Koike said that “securing communications is a top priority in times of disaster. She also said that the new hotspots “will also provide a crucial lifeline for inbound tourists” and that “therefore it is a very important initiative to install Wi-Fi by utilising public telephone booths.” By ‘times of disaster’ we’re guessing that she means in the event of earthquakes, which are – sadly – a relatively frequent occurrence in Japan. A total of 1500 new Passpoint-based Wi-Fi hotspots will be installed over the next three years, raising the total to 3,600 hotspot locations. Read more here.
Purple partners with Newcastle City Council, UK for city-wide Wi-Fi
Captive portal & Wi-Fi monetization software vendor Purple is teaming up with Newcastle City Council to help in delivering free Wi-Fi across the city for residents, students, and tourists. The company says it is giving away 120,000 UK pounds worth of free Wi-Fi hardware to software licenses to 1,000 small business in the city. Subscribers will us the Purple ConneX App to access “a seamless, secure and dense network of connected locations throughout the city,” this news report says. Purple – once one of many captive portal and Wi-Fi monetization software providers – has been around for more than a decade, making it easier for Wi-Fi users to connect to Wi-Fi at a host of different venue types, including retail stores, hotels, shopping malls, stadiums, and more.
/Claus.
