In 2020, Wi-Fi 6 will shine in the wireless market, and the size of the Chinese market alone will be close to $ 200 million, IDC predicts.
According to a report released by IDC today, the overall size of the WLAN market reached 230 million US dollars in the third quarter of 2019, which is in a steady upward trend.
Among them, Wi-Fi 6 started to appear from some mainstream manufacturers in the third quarter of 2019, and the Wi-Fi 6 products that debuted for the first time in the third quarter of 2019 had a sales scale of US $4.7 million.
Combining the historical data of the Wi-Fi 5 Chinese market, we can see that Wi-Fi 5 reached an explosive growth of 512% in 2015, and then maintained a compound annual growth rate of more than 40% from 2015 to 2019. The market brings a strong drive.
The product development trajectory of Wi-Fi 5, especially the slowdown in growth from 2019, is alluding to the iteration of new products, and 2020 is the first full year of Wi-Fi 6 entering the market. Under the background of the market growth of the previous generation, the wireless market was given a boost.
There is a certain difference between the development trajectory of Wi-Fi 5 products and the love between Wi-Fi 6 and 5G products. Among them, 5G has some restraints on Wi-Fi 6.
In some specific scenarios, taking the public domain as an example, the terminal device user will preferentially select the 5G network to which the device has an existing link to reduce the demand for Wi-Fi;
At the same time, the rapid development of 5G has also driven the growth of Wi-Fi 6 to some extent.
As we all know, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are similar products that occupy a comparative advantage in performance. Both can compete with intelligent social drivers at high speeds, low latency, and high concurrency.
Wi-Fi 6 will also form a complementary and driving relationship with 5G in many use scenarios. The main features of 5G and outside, Wi-Fi 6 will have their own uses in different indoor and outdoor work scenarios. .
Wi-Fi 6 is a high-speed, intelligent, and highly concurrent network product. The theoretical maximum support rate is nearly 10Gbps, which can achieve the highest quality wireless network at present.
It supports VR, AR, 8K ultra-high-definition video, multimedia, and desktop clouds, while also supporting to a large extent the emerging application loads and other technologies involved in today's digital transformation, such as AI, big data, edge computing, etc., which is more worthwhile. It is mentioned that the support efficiency of the Internet of Things is significantly improved, and more Internet of Things is achieved.
Therefore, Wi-Fi 6 has received widespread attention since its launch and has been gradually implemented in major projects.
From an industry perspective, after experiencing the "trial period" in the second half of 2019, different industries hold different degrees of acceptance and acceptance of Wi-Fi 6. For example, in the environment of some large enterprises, Wi-Fi 5 products are enough to support the wireless network needs within the enterprise, and the upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 is not just required.
However, in some industries with slightly higher network quality requirements, Wi-Fi 6 products still have a high degree of recognition.
Among them, the education industry holds the top position and accounts for most of the Wi-Fi 6 market. Among them, the equipment upgrade of colleges and universities to meet the urgent needs of smart campuses, online classrooms, etc., and the favorable transformation cycle of the summer vacation is the market of the education industry. Driving force.
In the medical field, for the Internet of Things, the demand for intelligent medical care is increasingly urgent, which means that high-concurrency and high-speed wireless devices are required to support it.
Most industry customers have a more recognized attitude and intention to expand demand after completing the "review trial" of Wi-Fi 6 devices in the second half of 2019.
In 2019, from the manufacturer's point of view, the number of manufacturers that released Wi-Fi 6 products was less than 10, and they were all leaders in the WLAN market.
Terminal products supporting Wi-Fi 6 are also rare. Only some models of Apple, Samsung, and OPPO-based smartphone manufacturers support Wi-Fi 6, accounting for only 2-3% of the total mobile phone sales.
Only a small number of chip makers from Qualcomm, Broadcom and Intel currently support Wi-Fi 6.
In the first two months of 2020, the research and development progress and plans of well-known chip manufacturers and well-known terminal equipment manufacturers related to Wi-Fi 6 showed a very strong momentum.
Chip manufacturers have developed the most advanced mobile platforms to support Wi-Fi 6, 5G connection functions for smart phones and other terminal devices through multi-user algorithm technologies such as OFDMA, MU-MIMO and support for 6GHz spectrum.
Currently known terminal design models are close to 2000 models, many of which are well-known Chinese mobile phone manufacturers.
This means that although the Wi-Fi 6 market is only in its infancy, it has strong market potential and will be rapidly recognized and developed in 2020.
Guo Yue, an analyst at IDC's China Enterprise Network Product Research Department, believes that although Wi-Fi 6 products have been born strongly, they are not yet mature, and they are still facing many challenges while they are full of opportunities.
Among them, cost, acceptance and other issues still need time to develop; Wi-Fi 5 products are already in the mature stage and will still occupy the market for a period of time.
While products in the WLAN market follow the overall market development trend, they also need to understand at what stage the product life cycle of a particular product is.
At present, Wi-Fi 6 is in the period of introduction and high-speed growth. It will gradually replace Wi-Fi 5 in the mature period and Wi-Fi 4 in the recession phase from 2020. 2020 will be the first year of the rapid growth of Wi-Fi 6.
