Wireless Technology

The global market for Routers is projected to reach US$35.9 billion by 2017, primarily driven by factors such as rising IP traffic, legacy network upgrades and growing prominence of enterprise mobility and workforce virtualization. Introduction of advanced products with superior capabilities and features and robust demand from developing markets, particularly Asia-Pacific, also augur well for the market.

Smart Home sensor network chipset shipments will approach 100 million worldwide in 2015, enabling nearly $6 billion in cloud services for energy and home service providers.  Adoption of Smart Home sensor networking is accelerating in several channels and new business models are already emerging.

Driven by global trend towards wireless connectivity, the world market for Wireless USB (WUSB) Devices is projected to witness increased demand over the next few years and reach about 10.8 million units in volume sales by 2017. Increase in number of mobile Internet devices and robust demand from developing markets, particularly Asia-Pacific, also augur well for the future of this market.

The global BTS antenna market declined by 16.3 % in 2010, according to the latest report titled "Global BTS Antenna Market Analysis and Forecast". The decline in 2010 was partly due to the Indian telecom embargo and subsequent freezing of all wireless network deployments in mid 2010 within the country. The market continues to shift away from single band sectorized panel antennas to multi band antennas. As a result, multi-band antennas reached nearly 28% of the overall mix, compared with 10% in 2009.

NFC stands for Near Field Communication. It is a protocol which enables devices like smart phones and portables to communicate in short range with minimum setup time. The idea of NFC is to enable sending and receiving information with other NFC devices to enable identification or content delivery. RFID is the most prominent of NFC, and the concept of NFC was taken from it. It is meant as a substitute for ID bar tags. RFID allows a tag to be linked so every item can then transmit or receive information whenever needed. The tag does not need to be in the line of sight of the reader and just needs to be within transmitting range of it.

The global market for rapidly growing RF technologies was worth $200 billion in 2010. That value is projected to be $416 billion in 2015, after increasing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.7%. The global market for rapidly growing RF technologies can be broken down into seven segments – HDTV, advanced cellular, GPS, wireless networks, RFID, digital radio, and RF plasma. RF technologies use electromagnetic radiation or energy in the 15 kHz-to-300 GHz range to accomplish a wide range of objectives, including broadcasting, two-way communication, manufacturing applications, and security and access control. These technologies are important not only from an economic standpoint but from regulatory, health, environmental, and national security perspectives as well.

It has been a decade since technologists first talked about the “Internet of Things.”  Although there are many definitions and perspectives on what this means, it is clear that smart objects will become the largest part of the Internet’s addressable space in the future.  The question has been:  How do we connect with the virtually limitless smart objects that will and are being provisioned in personal area networks (PANs), home area networks (HANs), WLANS, LANS, WANS, etc.?  That question has largely been answered with IPv6/6LoWPAN and ON World’s latest report analyzes the potentially disruptive impact and how ZigBee and 802.15.4 are energizing this expanding ecosystem.

Total contract awards for the Chinese OEMs were 78.9% in 2010. Total contracts for Huawei Technologies increased 39% year over year and confirms the base station market share gains that the company has been claiming while ZTE contract awards increased 80%. However despite these gains, both OEMs have continued to be locked out of the lucrative Tier 1 LTE market in the United States with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson winning the Sprint Nextel tender. Asia Pacific continued to be the largest region for contract awards and accounted for 41.8% with India awarding 37 contracts, just ahead of China.

World market for RFID technology is projected to reach US$12.7 billion by the year 2015. RFID technology which has numerous medium to long-term benefits stacked in its favor, has managed to stay afloat, and perform remarkably well even in the dismal economic scenario, riding on demand from organizations seeking to enhance their efficiency levels and simultaneously save costs. Over the years, incremental development of a wide range of reader and sensor technologies, such as active and passive RFIDs, mobile devices, environmental sensors, and RTS opened up new business application possibilities for RFID and sensors. The technology has already gained wide prominence in applications such as supply chain management, cargo tracking, asset management, document tracking, contactless payments, library systems, and even human implantation.

The global BTS antenna market grew by 17.2 % in 2009 acording to researchers. The market remains dominated by single band sectorized panel antennas but multi band antennas reached 10% of the overall mix. Researchers are forecasting that the BTS antenna market will experience strong growth in 2011 and 2012 before slowing down in 2013. Multi-band BTS antennas grew 39% year over year and are anticipated triple in volumes by 2014 as demands for reducing site costs are driving the migration from single band products. The emergence of the new 800MHz Digital Dividend spectrum as well the 2600MHz LTE spectrum is also driving demand for multi band antennas.