Telcos Need More Than TV And Broadband For ROI -- According to Forrester Research, Telcos, faced with a growing list of competitors and rising capital expenses, are looking to TV services to offset shrinking core revenues. But even coupled with voice and broadband Internet services, TV revenues will not recoup the costs of a multi-billion dollar broadband upgrade. Telcos will need to add a myriad of other services like home security, network-based storage, and video surveillance services to make a profit. Telcos core voice and data businesses have taken a beating. The mean monthly spend on local services has stagnated at $29.17 down from $31.70 in 2003. Monthly long distance spending has fallen from $18.33 to $12.75 during the same time. It will get worse, because VoIP promises to drive prices closer to $30 for unlimited local and nationwide long distance.
Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....