The quest for connectivity continues to drive consumer electronics (CE) manufacturers to enable their products with Wi-Fi technology. Given already huge penetration of wireless local area networks around the world, in the coming years the amount of Wi-Fi-enabled devices will quadruple, according to analysts.

The next 5 years will see an increase in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, from over 500 million in 2009 to nearly 2 billion in 2014. Devices leading the pace of adoption include Blu-ray players/recorders, e-readers, and digital televisions.

“The reality of 802.11n-enabled devices being available is that many of the technical issues that constrained Wi-Fi adoption in video-centric CE devices in the past have been remedied. As a result, we expect the adoption of Wi-Fi in the living room to accelerate.  Across all 'digital living room' consumer electronics, which includes set top boxes, game consoles, and other such devices, Wi-Fi-enabled devices will exceed 200 million units by 2014.” said Frank Dickson, vice president of research at In-Stat.

Mobile devices with Wi-Fi will still dominate shipments. For example, in 2013, shipments of mobile phones with embedded Wi-Fi are projected to exceed 0.75 billion units.

E-book readers Wi-Fi attach rates will increase from 3% in 2009 to 88% by 2014. In addition, 29 million digital picture frames will be shipped in 2014; 53% will be Wi-Fi-enabled.

Tags: Wi-Fi