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.
Enterprise AI adoption keeps running into the same wall: the moment sensitive data, model weights, or agent memory leave a tightly controlled environment, security teams lose visibility into what happens to them while the workload is actually running. Confidential computing exists to close that gap, and new research from ABI Research shows the technology has matured enough, across CPUs, GPUs, containers, and now agentic AI, to become a foundational requirement for enterprises building sovereign AI infrastructure: computing environments they control end to end rather than simply rent. Protection is Moving From CPUs to GPUs ABI Research finds that CPU-based confidential computing is closest to mass-market adoption, the product of years spent hardening chip-level isolation for general workloads. GPU-based confidential computing is now generating the strongest momentum, and for good reason. It addresses one of the largest unresolved gaps in AI security: protecting data and models while inf...