New Delhi, Dec 24 (IANS): India's networking market which includes ethernet switch, routers, and WLAN (wireless local area network) segments witnessed a 16.4 per cent year-over-year (YoY) decline in the third quarter of this year due to the negative impact of Covid-19, industry tracker International Data Corporation (IDC) said on Thursday.

The decline during the July-September period was majorly characterised by the decline in router revenues.

The routing business in India declined by 40.2 per cent YoY in Q3, IDC said, adding that Cisco leads the router market with a 64.4 per cent share followed by Juniper and Nokia.

The WLAN market in India grew marginally by 3.1 per cent YoY.

The market for Wi-Fi 6 also witnessed significant traction in the Indian market. While the revenue contribution of Wi-Fi 6 differed by vendors, there was a significant jump in the sales of Wi-Fi 6 access points across all the major vendors in the segment.

With a market share of 29.8 per cent, TP-Link was the market leader in the WLAN segment during Q3, followed by D-Link due to the rapid increase in demand for consumer gateway routers.

The enterprise class WLAN segment was led by Cisco followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

"Covid-19 has accelerated the enterprise movement towards cloud which has become the origin of transformation in the networking ecosystem," Sudharsan Raghunathan, Senior Market Analyst, Enterprise Networking, IDC India, said in a statement.

"Many of the networking investments have been around technologies that enable seamless working from anywhere, enhancing the security framework, extending the corporate network efficiently, easier manageability and troubleshooting, and bringing back employees into the office premises safely."

Switching had a YoY decline of 8.8 per cent in Q3, IDC said, adding that much like the routing segment, the decline in the ethernet switch segment was attributed to the decline in investments from service providers.

Cisco continued to dominate the ethernet switch market with a 59.8 per cent share during Q3, followed by Huawei and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IDC said.

However, according to an IDC India forecast, increased adoption of emerging technologies such as cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, etc. would drive incremental revenues in the coming years. IDC also expects large investments for 5G rollouts in the next couple of years.