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.
Semiconductor forecasts rarely move enough to reshape an enterprise boardroom budget conversation. Omdia's latest worldwide market study findings does exactly that. The research firm has raised its 2026 global semiconductor revenue forecast to 94.1 percent year-over-year growth, an increase driven almost entirely by memory pricing tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure. For technology executives, the number itself matters less than what sits underneath it. Applied-AI demand has now outrun the industry's capacity to produce and package the chips it needs, and Omdia expects that imbalance to persist through early 2027. The Semiconductor Forecast Revision Memory integrated circuits, DRAM and NAND combined, are now projected to account for more than 50 percent of total semiconductor revenue in 2026. That threshold has rarely been crossed in the industry's history. It marks a structural shift in where chip economics get decided. Logic used to set the pace of the industr...