The global Broadband market is forecast to pass 190 million subscribers this year and will be approaching 440 million by the end of 2010, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. DSL technology is set to strengthen its lead over cable based subscriptions with an anticipated 77 percent of the worldwide broadband market in 2010, representing 332 million subscriptions versus 76 million for cable. The report anticipates that, along with Japan and South Korea, Sweden and Finland countries will top the broadband penetration tables at over 30 percent penetration by population. By the end of the forecast period direct fibre and other access methods will still account for well under 10 percent of global broadband subscribers, though after that date the report predicts that the nature of the broadband market may change fundamentally with the advent of WiMAX and other wireless broadband technologies. The worldwide broadband market will change significantly over the next five years. While the last half decade has seen developed markets account for the lion�s share of broadband net additions, the next five years will see substantial growth in two major Asian markets, China and India, as growth in Western Europe, North America and Asia�s developed markets slow. By virtue of its high population, China will overtake the US for total broadband subscribers in 2008, and by 2010 the country will account for a quarter of all the world�s broadband subscriptions. Despite this, China�s penetration rate will still be less than 10 percent by population. Over the forecast period the source of revenues for operators will substantially switch from providing access to offering services over broadband and the most important of these will be TV, particularly over DSL networks.
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...