Revenue earned by consumer broadband value-added services (BVAS) more than doubled during 2004 -- At the beginning of the year it was running at an annual rate of about $3.3 billion worldwide. By the end of the year the figure was $6.9 billion. This is the first time it has been possible to estimate the growth of this new market, using the data provided by the second edition of Point Topic's report on The Consumer BVAS Market. The BVAS market is vitally important for service providers who need to find ways of increasing the revenue they receive from broadband services. The 2004 results are good news for them from this point of view. Most value-added services delivered over broadband increased in both users and total revenues. Services such as video over broadband, music and voice over IP (VoIP) all grew strongly. The increase in the run-rate of revenues was much steeper than the growth in the number of consumer broadband lines, which grew about 45 percent to 131 million, or in consumer broadband access revenues, which grew by about 22 percent to $39 billion. Price cuts by both DSL and cable operators resulted in revenues growing more slowly than the number of lines.
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...