What are SMB Wi-Fi Customers' Plans?

ABI Research, respected market trends analysts, have been delving into the often murky world of small-medium businesses or SMBs and their Wi-Fi tastes.

The problem is that there has never been any clearly defined pattern when it comes to the requirements of SMBs and Wi-Fi.

To try to get some understanding of the nature of this particular beast, ABI decided to make an examination of Cisco/Linksys who between them occupy 50% of the current market.

So the assumption was if they looked at their customers they would get a good view of the market as a whole.

Until Cisco swallowed up Linksys in an acquisition deal, both companies had been working with WLAN stock.

They had slightly differing markets, with Cisco concentrating on enterprise and Linksys chasing consumers.

Since they combined forces the companies have managed to reel in SMB customers to the new Linksys/Cisco brand.

The new company has invested a lot of effort in the migration to 802.11n with over 40% of its clients indicating that they wish to definitely upgrade, most within a year.

However, the ABI research showed that a Linksys SMB customer is most likely to purchase Wi-Fi equipment from an online retailer or a bricks-and-mortar retailer.

Conversely SMB customers of Cisco-branded Wi-Fi equipment are far more likely to purchase their equipment from a WLAN VAR or directly from the manufacturer.

Importantly, ABI also noted that SMBs don’t have time or resources to manage security.

A real opportunity exists for a managed WLAN security monitoring service.

In fact, nearly half of those surveyed expressed an interest in such a service.

Story link: What are SMB Wi-Fi Customers' Plans?