With the recent release of Amazon's cloud music service and do a similar offering from Apple on the horizon, it's likely that the recent thunderstorm in Amazon's cloud will do little to slow growth in the sector.
Charlie who? Apple is "winning"
Apple's tightly controlled ecosystem and sexy device and app catalog has proven to be both incredibly popular and profitable. The Cupertino goliath recently overtook Nokia to become the world's largest handset manufacturer, according to a Strategy Analytics report released on April 21, 2011, with $11.9 billion in wholesale handset revenues for the first quarter of 2011. "The PC vendor has successfully captured revenue leadership of the total handset market in less than four years," Strategy Analytics said in a press release.
Despite being the market leader, it wasn't always roses for Apple in the press this month, as details of their GPS tracking and logging "function" re-surfaced and became the fodder for privacy pundits and wireless blogs. Apple is also engaged in litigation with Samsung over patent infringements. Apple claims Samsung copied the iPhone and iPad with its Galaxy series, and Samsung countersued two days later in Germany, Japan and Korea, claiming Apple stole patented technology related to data transmission.
Testing the speed limits of next-gen networks
Broadband carriers have been busy this month upgrading and testing their networks as super-speed broadband becomes both a competitive differentiator and a premium service offering. Virgin Media is testing a 1.5Gbps broadband network in London that operates on current network infrastructure, which it claims will be the "world's fastest broadband." In Australia, a 1Gbps fiber network was rolled out to a test customer base of about 2900, and in the United States, Google selected Kansas City, Kansas for a high-speed fiber-based broadband network.
While Google is busy testing their own gigabit fiber broadband network, Comcast has launched its Extreme 105 Xfinity broadband service this month in major US markets, which delivers a blazing 1.05 Gbps connection at a pricey $200/month [ed. note: quoted service rate in Chicago, IL at press time]. It remains to be seen if the price to performance ratio of Extreme 105 will be enticing enough to draw customers away from other highspeed broadband services that offer about half the bandwidth for about half the price—especially once people learn how quickly Comcast's 250gb data cap can be reached with a 1.05Gbps connection.
