According to Strategy Analytics, the strong evolution of cellular-only markets will dramatically slow the global adoption of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC). By 2010 there will be 500 million cellular-only users generating three times the voice revenues of their FMC counterparts. With major carriers such as BT, Korea Telecom and BellSouth deploying FMC services, convergence is back on the agenda and the specter of WiFi or Bluetooth destabilizing in-building cellular revenue flows again looms large. However, handset prices and availability will represent the biggest barrier to FMC adoption. "The 'voice goes mobile' mantra of the cellular industry is now a reality rather than a mission statement." comments David Kerr, Vice President, Strategy Analytics' Global Wireless Practice. "Cellular already accounts for 60 percent of the world's access lines, one third of all voice minutes and one half of all voice revenues, with 10 percent of homes relying on only a mobile phone for voice. FMC providers will have to work hard to turn this tide as players like Vodafone and O2 fine tune their wireless-only solutions."
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...