Service provider CapEx spending made a nice rebound in 2004 with worldwide spending totaling $207 billion, indicating a brighter future for the service provider WAN equipment market, reports In-Stat. Service provider CapEx budgets will continue to grow moderately over the next five years, as wireline service providers invest in new triple-play and converged MPLS networks, and wireless service providers build new 3G infrastructure, the high-tech market research firm says. Worldwide service provider CapEx budgets are forecast to reach $278 billion in 2009. "In-Stat forecasts particularly strong growth in sales of packet telephony media gateways and softswitches, core and edge routers, WiMAX base transceiver stations, and teledatacom servers, in 2005," says Henry Goldberg, In-Stat analyst. "Sales of multiservice switches, optical transport equipment, and DSLAMs should also grow." The largest component of worldwide WAN equipment sales in 2004 was mobile wireless infrastructure, which was about 29 percent of total worldwide network CapEx budgets. Voice circuit switches, which used to be the largest component of wireline networking hardware, accounted for only about 5 percent of WAN equipment sales to service providers in 2004. DSLAM port shipments continued to grow strongly in 2004, but revenues declined because of reduced prices due to stiff competition among suppliers.
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...