Point Topic's first-quarter analysis of the worldwide DSL market shows the number of lines increased by 10.5 percent to 107.3 million in Q1 2005. Over 37 million DSL lines were added since March 2004 last year, taking growth to 54 percent for the 12 months ending 31 March 2005. There were just over 10.1m lines added in the first quarter of 2005 alone - second only to the 10.4m added in the fourth quarter of 2004. These results show DSL is continuing to enjoy good momentum in 2005. The analysis also shows changes in traditional patterns, with growth in high penetration countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan slowing, whilst emerging markets such as Turkey, Thailand and Poland are showing growth of 24 percent or more. Incumbent operators are beginning to lose market share to unbundlers in countries where unbundling is well established. For example, the number of wholesale lines provided by France Telecom fell by 19,000, and that by KPN (Netherlands) fell by 22,000 as competitors switch to unbundled lines. The UK was the fastest growing major DSL country, adding over 20 percent to reach almost 5m DSL lines in the quarter - faster than world leader China which grew by 15 percent and looks set to pass 20m 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...