Breakdown of percentage share of different vendors
The play button starts the time axis and the running slider shows the date.
Notes
- These charts do not represent the true statistics due to the presence of a number of simplifying assumptions and gross sub-sampling of the database.
- All data is taken through API calls from Wigle.net - a crowd-sourced AP location database of more than 100 million Wi-Fi APs.
- The database contains 'first-seen' and 'last-seen' timestamps for each AP in its record. We use these timestamps to estimate the evolution of no. of APs with time.
- We assume an AP has been taken out of service if it has not been seen by any Wigle.net user for a period of 12 months. Thus the drop in density could be due to just a lack of enough Wigle.net users collecting measurements in that area.
- For each city, we sample an area ranging from 3-15 km. and calculate the density accordingly. Smaller areas are used for denser cities such as New York and San Francisco since the API response from Wigle.net is rate limited, i.e. we cannot get the info about all the records if we specify a big area.
- The accuracy of the numbers can be substantially improved by further averaging over multiple different areas within a city.
- The percentage share of commercial APs is calculated by matching the 1st three bytes of the logged MAC addresses with the IEEE OUI record of the following top ten enterprise/service-provider WLAN vendors: Aerohive, Aruba, Avaya, HP, Juniper, Meraki, Meru, Motorola, Ruckus, and Cisco. Since there are other enterprise/service-provider WLAN vendors, the percentage share estimated here is a lower bound.
- Inferring the combined and individual share of the commercial WLAN vendors through the MAC address of APs is subject to substantial errors since vendors could have used different OUIs than the ones registered in the official database.