ABI Research suggests HSDPA as a Low-Cost Path to Fast Mobile Broadband -- "Mobile communications infrastructure vendors and carriers, impatiently waiting to offer their customers mobile broadband services, would do well to consider HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) as an economical alternative. The prerequisites, according to ABI Research, are the rollouts of the next-generation UMTS networks that are starting to take place in Europe and Asia, and are planned for other regions. The area covered by these networks should expand and fill out very quickly starting in about 12 months, according to ABI Research. The arrival of this technology should boost data traffic and revenues, as well as demand for data cards. What about WiMAX's promise of ubiquitous broadband? IEEE 802.16e will most likely be offered mainly in dense metropolitan areas, and while it will be faster than HSDPA, and cheaper per bit, the upfront deployment costs are much, much higher."
The prevailing narrative around artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of relentless scale. Bigger models, bigger clusters, bigger budgets. The assumption, largely unchallenged until recently, was that raw parameter count translated directly into competitive advantage. New research from Omdia suggests it's time to retire that assumption. According to the latest market study by Omdia, parameter growth in frontier AI models has slowed to around 5 percent annually since 2021, a stark contrast to the more than hundredfold expansion seen between 2019 and 2021. Enterprise AI Market Development For executives who have been making infrastructure and investment decisions based on the assumption that AI would keep demanding ever-larger, ever-more-expensive hardware, this finding deserves serious attention. The race to the top of the model size leaderboard has, at least for now, plateaued. Crucially, Omdia's analysts are not reading this as an AI winter. Alexander Harrowell, senior pri...