Lower Prices and Bundling Will Bring Broadband to 78 Million US Homes by 2010 -- After years of dominating the US market, cable operator's share of broadband Internet customers will decline steadily over the next five years, according to Strategy Analytics. Their report notes that although cable remains the leading broadband platform in the US, its share of the total base of broadband users fell from 62 to 59 percent in 2004. By the end of 2005, Strategy Analytics predicts that cable's share will slip to 57 percent, while share for telcos offering DSL and fiber services will grow from 39 to 41 percent. The combination of falling prices and multi-service bundles combining TV, telephony and high-speed Internet services will drive overall adoption of broadband sharply upward over the next five years. By 2010, the report predicts that nearly 78 million US customers will use some type of broadband service. Cable operators will account for about half of that total, while telcos will serve 43 percent of subscribers through a combination of DSL and advanced fiber networks. Meanwhile, SBC, Verizon and other telcos are using aggressive price cuts to maintain subscriber growth in DSL.
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...