Worldwide, wireless subscriber growth is experiencing robust expansion after several years of slower growth due to the economic downturn of the last few years, reports In-Stat. By 2009, the worldwide wireless market will grow to more than 2.3 billion subscribers. There will be no relief from the ongoing battles for airlink supremacy over the next several years. "GSM's steady growth through 2007 will turn negative as operators move subscribers to third-generation (3G) WCDMA," says David Chamberlain, In-Stat Senior Analyst. "While the second-generation GSM system (including GPRS & EDGE) will remain the dominant airlink throughout the forecast period, CDMA airlink standards (CDMA & WCDMA) will soon encroach on GSM's numbers. By 2009, WCDMA networks will be providing service for over 40 percent of the world's CDMA users." However, those inroads are much less dramatic when classifying WCDMA as an evolution of the GSM system. The total number of new subscribers in 2004-2009 is expected to be 777.7 million worldwide.
Every product roadmap conversation with a technology vendor now runs through one filter that has nothing to do with the roadmap itself: does the company have an AI story that a buyer's finance team would actually underwrite. Forrester Research just gave that gut check a formal structure. Its newly introduced AI Disruption Model evaluates 17 technology and service categories, spanning more than 200 individual markets, against nine factors including AI substitutability, labor intensity, and switching costs. The finding that should reorder tech vendor strategy conversations this quarter is not which markets grow. It is how few of them do, and what that scarcity means for everyone else. Only Three Categories Get an Unambiguous Green Light According to the research, infrastructure providers such as cloud platforms, data centers, and storage; data and AI providers spanning models, platforms, and governance tooling; and cybersecurity and identity providers covering zero trust and AI agent...