One quarter of worldwide households have Wi-Fi, says Strategy Analytics
According to a new report from Strategy Analytics, 25 percent of all “households” worldwide now have Wi-Fi networks set up. In terms of adoption, South Korea tops the list of the 17 countries the firm researched …
Context & Ripple Effects
Strategy Analytics has spent the past year building the case that the home network is going wireless: it forecast that Wi-Fi would overtake wired network traffic by 2015, and its late-2011 data showed global tablet shipments more than doubling to 26.8 million units — devices that assume a home WLAN rather than an Ethernet jack.
The new finding that 25% of households worldwide have Wi-Fi, with South Korea topping the 17 countries surveyed, quantifies the installed base behind that thesis — and explains why the firm's connected-TV research on players like Apple TV and Roku treats in-home wireless as table stakes.
First-order effects
- Consumer networking vendors gain a measurable global addressable market: three of every four households are still unserved, while South Korea's lead shows how far ahead mature markets already are.
- Streaming-box makers such as Apple and Roku can sell into a base that Strategy Analytics itself sized at roughly a quarter of world households — the prerequisite for their connected-TV forecasts.
Second-order effects
- Broadband providers face growing pressure to treat the wireless router as the default customer-premises product, since tablets and media players reach the home only through it.
- Device pricing power shifts toward whoever bundles seamless Wi-Fi setup — the addiction-level attachment found in the 2010 survey of US users makes flaky home networks a churn risk for carriers and box makers alike.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory holds toward Wi-Fi carrying most home traffic, Ethernet retreats to a backhaul role and the home-network market reorganizes around router quality and spectrum management rather than ports and cabling.
- Countries lagging the 25% figure become the growth frontier for both networking hardware and the streaming services that depend on it — a gap regulators and ISPs will increasingly be measured against.
The trend: Household connectivity is consolidating around in-home wireless as the default access layer, turning the router into the choke point for every device category — tablets, streaming boxes, phones — that assumes it.