According to Point Topic, broadband value-added services for business users showed revenue growth of just over 60 percent during 2004. At the start of 2004, revenue was running at a yearly rate of around $2.3 billion. This figure grew to $3.7 billion by year-end. This is the first time that it has been possible to estimate the growth of the new market. Value-added services are extremely important for service providers, who need to find ways of increasing revenues from broadband services. As broadband connection tariffs become more competitive in price, value-added services are the most important way of increasing margins for service providers. This makes these 2004 results important for ISPs serving the business market. Growth in BVAS revenues was lower than the rate of growth in the number of business broadband lines. These grew from 10.6 million to 19 million during 2004, an increase of 79 percent. Most businesses continue to obtain and use their broadband connections just for Internet access and related applications such as email. Relatively few use broadband to increase the efficiency of their internal business processes. Business broadband access revenues (the total revenue from installation and connection charges) grew more slowly than the number of lines during 2004, increasing by just under 50 percent from $13 billion to $19 billion. This was because of reducing average tariff levels during the year.
Every executive who has approved a connected product roadmap has made a quiet assumption: the network underneath it will still be there. That assumption is about to be tested at a scale the automotive industry has never faced. The global connected vehicle installed base is heading toward a billion units, and the cellular technology most of those vehicles depend on is scheduled to begin its retirement before the end of the decade. For automakers, fleet operators, insurers, and the telecom carriers that serve them, the question is whether the recurring revenue those services promise can survive a connectivity layer with a shorter life than the vehicle carrying it. How Scale Meets an Expiry Date Omdia research forecasts that the global connected vehicle installed base will surpass 1.05 billion units by 2035, up from 473.7 million in 2025. Few installed bases of any kind more than double in a decade, and this one signals that connectivity is moving from premium differentiator to baseline e...