Mobile broadband connections on PCs and modems will reach half a billion by 2017, driving $65 billion in service revenues and nearly 20 million Terabytes of mobile data traffic, according to Strategy Analytics. Says Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, director/Mobile Broadband Opportunities, “Two key drivers for the mobile broadband PC modem market are 4G LTE deployments and strong subscription growth in emerging markets, such as China and India, where operators are adding 3G connections. With more LTE deployments around the globe, mobile broadband rivals fixed networks. LTE becomes the connection of choice for USB modems, embedded PCs and mobile hotspots that provide wide area mobility to Wi-Fi devices”…Despite the “unprecedented expansion” of the digital universe due to the massive amounts of data being generated daily by people and machines, IDC Digital Universe estimates only 0.5 percent of the world’s data is being analyzed. IDC projects that the digital universe will reach 40 ZB by 2020, equivalent to 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. “If we could save all 40 ZB onto today’s Blue-ray discs, the weight of those discs (without any sleeves or cases) would be the same as 424 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers,” the group notes. The current global breakdown of the digital universe looks like this: United States (32 percent), Western Europe (19 percent), China (13 percent), India (4 percent) and the rest of the world (32 percent). The promise of Big Data, IDC says, lies within the extraction of value from large, untapped pools of data. However, the majority of new data is largely untagged file-based and unstructured data, which means little is known about it; currently, only 3 percent of the potentially useful data is tagged and even less is analyzed. And much of the digital universe is unprotected: In 2012, while about 35 percent of the information in the digital universe required some type of data protection, less than 20 percent of the digital universe actually has these protections. Other IDC findings: As the infrastructure of the digital universe becomes ever more connected, information won’t reside within the region where it is consumed, nor will it need to. By 2020, IDC estimates that nearly 40 percent of data will be "touched" by cloud computing (private and public), meaning that somewhere between a byte’s origination and consumption, it will be stored or processed in a cloud.

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Ferguson On Deck at FTC

Current Republican FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson was tapped by President-elect Trump to lead the agency. He would replace Lina Khan , whose stance on mergers and an attempt to ban non-competes rankled

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