WBA Wi-Fi Survey: A Market Valued at $4T & Growing Strong

Wi-Fi continues to prove its substantial growth and economic impact, according to the findings of the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s 2024 Industry Report. The report estimates that the approximately 20 billion Wi-Fi devices used today create an economic value for Wi-Fi of $4 trillion.
The 6 GHz band is considered to be the most exciting driver of the Wi-Fi industry’s current momentum. Additionally, U.S. broadband households logged 533.8 GB monthly weighted average bandwidth usage in Q2 2023, advancing from 513.8 GB in Q2 2022, according to OpenVault.
One of the report’s main themes is the convergence of Wi-Fi and cellular. “Due to the improved capabilities of the Wi-Fi standards, and cellular drive into unlicensed spectrum, the two technologies are coming into contact in more ways than one — in both spectrum and use cases. To this end, convergence between the two camps is more important than ever, especially as private enterprise networks favor using both technologies to support highly innovative deployments,” the report states in its executive summary.
Nearly six in 10 (57.9%) respondents indicated that they were more confident in investing in Wi-Fi now than a year ago, when that figure was less than half of all respondents (46%). The chief motivator for those making investments in Wi-Fi is Quality of Service.
Another notable conclusion of the report is that 68% of respondents indicated they have deployed or plan to deploy Passport or Open Roaming. OpenRoaming extended to 3.5 million hotspots implemented by more than 650 organizations, the report showed.
A large majority (81.5%) of those surveyed said they were involved in in-home Wi-Fi networking, while 69.7% said they were already participating in or planned to participate in city-wide networks.
Nearly half (44.2%) said the ability to use the 6 GHz band was important, while slightly over one-fourth (25.9%) said it was somewhat important. Only 8.9% said it wasn’t important.
The WBA Wi-Fi Survey also summarized the impact of Wi-Fi 7, saying it adds three new key features and that it is nearing completion of the IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) standard.
WBA described the 2024 Wi-Fi Survey respondents as “stakeholders.”