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 global cloud computing market is undergoing new significant growth, driven by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and the demand for flexible, scalable infrastructure. The recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC) provides compelling evidence of this transformation, highlighting the accelerating growth in cloud infrastructure spending and the pivotal role of AI in shaping the industry's future trajectory. Shared Infrastructure Market Development The study reveals a 36.9 percent year-over-year worldwide increase in spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2024, reaching $33 billion. This growth substantially outpaced non-cloud infrastructure spending, which saw a modest 5.7 percent increase to $13.9 billion during the same period. The surge in cloud infrastructure spending was partially fueled by an 11.4 percent growth in unit demand, influenced by higher average selling prices, primari