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Wi-Fi 7 momentum rises as private wireless evolves toward larger deployments
After a bruising two years marked by supply-chain whiplash and bloated order books, the enterprise connectivity market is finally finding its footing again. According to Dell’Oro Group Research Director Sian Morgan, who joined RCR on a recent episode of Unmuted for a wide-ranging discussion on Wi-Fi, private wireless, and where enterprise investments are really headed, 2024 marked the bottom — and the recovery is now well underway.
Coming out of the pandemic, vendors selling into schools, hospitals, Fortune 500s, and SMBs were hit with extreme supply constraints. Those shortages pushed enterprises to over-order, creating an artificial surge in 2022. Once supply loosened, vendors “flooded the market with equipment,” Morgan explained, leaving excess inventory sitting in channels throughout 2023 and 2024. In wireless LAN alone, the industry saw three straight quarters of more than 25% revenue contraction. But by late 2024, demand finally began to normalize. Dell’Oro now expects double-digit growth in 2025, driven by the arrival of next-generation Wi-Fi and renewed enterprise refresh cycles.
Wi-Fi 7 surges as Wi-Fi 6/6E peaks
Wi-Fi 7’s commercial debut is already reshaping the upgrade path. While the technology accounted for just 5% of indoor access point shipments in 2024, momentum built quickly — particularly in China, CALA, and EMEA. Morgan said 2025 will be the year North America turns decisively toward Wi-Fi 7, with triple-digit revenue growth expected for the next several years. Once Wi-Fi 7 reaches roughly half of all unit shipments, the industry will begin pivoting toward Wi-Fi 8, which Dell’Oro expects to hit the enterprise market in late 2028.
Private wireless: Growing, but still small
Against Wi-Fi’s massive scale, private wireless continues to develop — but remains early. For campus-focused private 4G/5G networks, 2024 revenues were less than 10% of the wireless LAN market. Growth is steady, and more importantly, Morgan said, customer reference quality is improving. Early proofs-of-concept are now evolving into larger, sometimes global deployments, a sign that the market is maturing beyond pilots. “It’ll start to be a larger share … of the wireless LAN market, but still remain … a fairly small piece of the overall market,” she summarized.
Yet despite rising interest, Wi-Fi and private cellular aren’t cannibalizing each other. Wireless LAN, she explained, suits most enterprises because “in nearly all cases, it’s significantly cheaper,” and it’s also not well integrated into the enterprise management domain. But private wireless excels where Wi-Fi struggles: challenging RF conditions, high-mobility environments, ports, mines, large outdoor assets, or applications requiring tight mobility and security.
Integration is the future
The decisive factor in private wireless adoption may be who solves the enterprise integration gap. Today, equipment is dominated by telco vendors like Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei. But enterprise IT vendors — HPE (following its purchase of Athonet), or ALE with its Celona partnership — see opportunity in bridging 3GPP architectures with enterprise identity, policy, and management systems.
Still, device availability remains a structural limiter. “I don’t think I’m going out on a limb there to say that there [are] not very many technologies out there that have the … global scale of Wi-Fi. And I don’t think that’s going to change,” she said. “Device manufacturers are going to be focused on Wi-Fi, and then they’ll pick the profitable … use cases for private wireless where it makes sense,” said Morgan. “But I don’t think that we can rely on private wireless ever matching the scale of wireless LAN.”
