Wi-Fi has traditionally been used as a wireless-connectivity technology in residential and business networks. Increasingly, however, semiconductor vendors and consumer electronic equipment manufacturers are planning to use Wi-Fi as a means for consumer electronics connectivity.

Vendors are targeting Wi-Fi for use with a range of consumer electronics device segments, including printers; game consoles; digital TVs; DVD recorders and players; set-top boxes; PVRs; handheld game devices; MP3 players; digital still cameras and camcorders; PDAs; and mobile handsets.

In this regards, Research and Markets has announced a new report, “Untethered Fun: WLAN in Consumer Electronics Consumer Survey.” This report presents the results and analysis of a survey of 640 consumers residing in the United States, conducted in June 2005. The survey examined consumers' knowledge of, and attitudes and actions regarding Wi-Fi as a home networking technology in general, and as a means for wirelessly connecting consumer electronics devices in particular.

The results demonstrate that while respondents' existing home networks are fairly evenly split between Ethernet and Wi-Fi, future home network deployments are largely planned as Wi-Fi networks. The 640 tech-savvy consumers who participated in the survey still chose data-networking applications over consumer electronics applications as the applications for which they were most interested in using Wi-Fi connectivity.

Survey findings include:

• The challenges that Wi-Fi faces in terms of range, bandwidth, security and Quality-of-Service (QoS) are being addressed by new standards that have either recently been ratified or are set to be ratified over the next several years.
• The prevalence of wireless network availability, especially in-home networks, makes it increasingly likely that any consumer electronics device would benefit from Wi-Fi connectivity.
• More PCs in a respondent's household was positively correlated with a greater likelihood of having heard of Wi-Fi being used in various devices.