The EMEA WLAN market increased by 6.1 percent to $444.9 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2005, compared with $419.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2004. IDC's EMEA WLAN Tracker says that EMEA WLAN infrastructure showed revenue growth of 14.7 percent as WLAN client revenue declined by 10.6 percent. The decline in revenue in the WLAN client sector was due to the growing number of pre-installed connections on notebooks and desktops. During the first quarter, only 1.4 million add-on clients were shipped, a decline of 13 percent compared with the fourth quarter, at the same time that more than 4.7 million WLAN connections were pre-installed on notebooks or desktops.

IDC's European Telecommunications and Networking group's Evelien Wiggers said, "Wireless gateways/routers continued to take the largest share of the WLAN infrastructure segment and increased by 19.6 percent, while revenue for in-building access points only increased by 6.7 percent. Throughout the quarter, shipments of wireless routers/gateways to EMEA increased by 24 percent compared to the previous quarter. At the same time, shipments of in-building access points decreased by 2 percent."

For more on WLAN Q1 performance:
- see IDC's report