Amazon and Google mesh routers, along with gaming routers, bucked the declines of the broader market
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
Counterpoint notes that global Wi-Fi router shipments peaked in 2021, which was at the height of consumer hardware spending during the pandemic. There were some positive points in the report, with Asus and Google seeing global shipment increases of 3.8 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively, during Q1 2026. However, Xiaomi had a 1.3 percent shortfall, Netgear was down 3 percent, while TP-Link fell by 5.4 percent. Counterpoint also notes that “Others,” which includes dozens of other hardware vendors whose sales aren’t significant enough to be broken out individually, fell by 10.4 percent.
Since 2021, global shipments have declined by almost 34 percent, and a couple of factors explain this turn of events. For starters, many people who upgraded their Wi-Fi hardware in 2021 or 2022 simply see no reason to shift to newer technology. Even though the best Wi-Fi routers use the Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) standard, offering multi-gig speeds across the 6 GHz and 5 GHz bands, those performance benefits are not enticing consumers on the sidelines because of rising costs for more essential goods.
Asus offers up to 36% off its ZenWiFi mesh routers
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/routers/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/routers/global-consumer-wi-fi-router-shipments-fell-6-percent-in-q1-2026-mesh-systems-and-gaming-routers-still-prove-popular#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
- Save 84% on a two-year ExpressVPN subscription, offering four additional months for free — upgrade your privacy for under $70 with no-logs access to servers in
- AMD's upcoming Zen 6 Medusa Point 10-core APU pops up on Geekbench — chip is faster than Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 & even Ryzen AI Max+ 395
- Ingenious father fixes dead RTX 3070 with a jerry-rigged capacitor from an old radio — Saves worried son $120 in repair costs, GPU 'works better than before' no
- Claude Meets Blackwell Ultra: Anthropic’s Models Now Run on NVIDIA GB300 in Azure
- NVIDIA and AWS Collaborate to Bring AI to Production at Scale
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.