WCDMA services are penetrating markets more slowly than analysts had first anticipated, according to the latest assessment from ABI Research. The data-centric mobile communications platform looked set to enjoy rapid market success, but according to Lance Wilson, ABI Research's director of wireless research, "We have refined our appraisal of GSM/GPRS/EDGE versus WCDMA. The uptake of WCDMA is not likely to be as rapid as was once thought. It will show good growth, but there is still a lot of life left in GSM." "The rollout of WCDMA will continue," adds Wilson, "but service providers are also upgrading their GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks, so it will take a little longer for WCDMA to become the ubiquitous standard in the GSM family of technologies." Noting that "It's been difficult to gauge the uptake of WCDMA because there are so many factors affecting it," Wilson attributes the slower pace of adoption to issues of greater expense and of a lack of compelling applications. "The services being offered to the customer have not quite caught up with the technology," he says.
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...