Survey Sez 07/18/12

Data from TeleGeography’s Global Bandwidth Research Service reveal that demand for international bandwidth grew 45 percent in 2011, and at a compounded rate of 57 percent annually between 2007 and 2011. Although growth has slowed since 2008, when network capacity increased nearly 70 percent, aggregate capacity requirements have more than doubled every two years. While broadband subscriber growth has slowed in Latin America, Europe and North America, bandwidth demand in these regions has been fueled by increases in average broadband access speeds, enabling more frequent use of such high-bandwidth apps as video…Infonetics Research says Latin America has become “the most competitive and dynamic market for CMTS vendors, with market share fluctuating wildly from quarter to quarter,” with Motorola overtaking Cisco as the lead gear provider, dropping Arris to third. The group also notes global CMTS port shipments hit record levels in 1Q12, up 28 percent year over year, as MSOs continue to purchase more downstream and upstream CMTS capacity to deliver DOCSIS 3.0 and unicast video services…According to Strategy Analytics, the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system will capture a 4-percent share of 123 million smartphones sold in the U.S. market this year, up from 3 percent in 2011. Nokia, HTC and Samsung will be among the main hardware vendors driving growth. Microsoft’s U.S. smartphone market share remains relatively niche, and beating Android and iOS won’t be easy…Parks Associates finds the percentages of U.S. smart-TV owners who use this Internet-connected device to watch online video increased by more than 30 percent during the last six months, reaching nearly 60 percent. On a near-daily basis, 30 percent watch movies and 32 percent watch TV shows. In addition, the number of Internet-connectable TVs shipped will jump from less than 1 percent in 2008 to more than 45 percent this year.