Type of Article: MacTech Blog

More U.S. households now own a smartphone than a desktop, according to new research that Parks Associates (www.parkassociates.com) will discuss at the 19th-annual CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference. The conference runs May 19-21 in San Francisco.

In the last five years, desktop adoption declined from 90% to 69% among U.S. broadband households, while smartphone adoption increased from 36% to 78%, according to the research group. Tablet adoption increased from 7% to 63%.

The traditional telecom business has become a challenging environment to find growth and sustain profits. Beyond subscriber saturation (no one new to sell things to), this situation is exacerbated by pricing wars for traditional services (driven by T-Mobile/Sprint) and encroachment from OTT players into traditional communication services (Skype/WhatsApp). 

There will be 1.6 billion video viewers worldwide at end of 2015, increasing to 1.9 billion in 2019, according to new data from the Parks Associates research group (www.parksassociates.com).

New market data from ABI Research (www.abiresearch.com) forecasts that market for in-building wireless equipment and deployments will more than double the current market by 2020.