The Wi-Fi Chipset Market: Portable Connectivity Applications Drive Volumes

While I might not be ready to shell out $3,495 for In-Stat's latest report on the Wi-Fi Chipset Market, a closer look at the summary makes for interesting reading.

In 2006, approximately 213 million Wi-Fi chipsets shipped, representing a 32% growth rate over 2005 Wi-Fi chipset shipments. Market segments that drove growth in 2006 included the following:

- Mobile PCs (37% of total Wi-Fi chipset shipments)
- Home/SOHO Wireless Routers, Gateways, APs (18%)
- Portable CE (17%)
- External Clients (12%)
- Stationary CE (10%)
- Dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi handsets (3%)

Just think about some of those numbers for a minute. That is 79 million new notebook PCs who are potential customers of Wi-Fi hotspots. 38 Million homes and small businesses now have new wireless routers and gateways, which means that they will probably be looking for more bandwidth in the near future.

While dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi handsets only represented 3% of the market in 2006 (though 6.4 million is still a lot of chipsets), they predict that this will be the breakout category this year and will grow to be 20% by 2009. Even if the market only continues to grow at its current rate (32%), that could be almost 15 million devices.

As I outlined in the previous post, wireless technologies are incredibly well positioned to take advantage of all this growth. We believe that NextPhase Wireless is well positioned, too.