Wireless customers living in urban areas experience the highest number of overall network problems and have lower tolerance of those problems, according to the J.D. Power 2016 U.S. Wireless Network Quality Performance Study—Volume 2. The finding underscores the importance of continued investment by carriers in urban areas as the use of 4G LTE compatible smartphones grows and customers expect faster data speeds.
 
Now in its 14th year, the semiannual study is based on 10 problem areas of the customer experience: dropped calls; calls not connected; audio issues; failed/late voicemails; lost calls; text transmission failures; late text message notifications; Web/app connection errors; slow downloads/apps; and email connection errors. Network performance issues are measured as problems per 100 (PP100) connections, with a lower score reflecting fewer problems and higher overall performance.
 
According to the study, customers living in urban areas experience the...

APPSPIRE.me has released an infographic dubbed "iOS or Android: Which One for App Development?" that reveals insights to consider when choosing a platform for development. The infographic compares the positives and negatives of both iOS and Android development including development costs, user market, and return on investment.

The infographic lists over 15 pros and cons of development through iOS and Android. It also touches on the importance of target audience and also mentions the issues with fragmentation.

“Thirty-seven percent of mobile app owners are developing their app on both iOS and Android, and that number is continuing to grow," says Carson Barker, founder and CEO of APPSPIRE.me. "However, it is crucial to understand how differently iOS and Android are in developers' perspective. "Before development starts, it's important to research different developers to match what your specific goals are with your app. We wanted to give app owners a start on that...

Free public Wi-Fi stats from American ITRC (Identity Theft Resource Center) show that 78.5% of people who connect to publically available Internet networks believe that using public Wi-Fi can lead to identity theft. Yet only 26.7% percent use VPN, the most reliable tool for personal online protection that encrypts all traffic between Internet and device into a secure tunnel.
 
Research shows that Wi-Fi user fears aren’t unfounded, since public Wi-Fi can be hacked into very easily. Hackers often position themselves as Wi-Fi hotspots and easily steal personal information of each individual that logs in. In addition, identity thieves have lately been using wireless sniffers, a software designed to intercept and decode data when it is transmitted over a network.
 
Anyone who is shopping online or doing online banking by using a wireless network is especially vulnerable to hacking attacks that can steal one’s credit card data or identity. There’s no lack of...

New data from Juniper Research has found that 4K OTT (over-the-top) content will finally see mass-market appeal, with adoption set to soar over the next five years.

The research group found that 4K OTT services will attract over 189 million unique users globally by 2021, up from just 2.3 million this year, driven by greater content availability and compatible devices. In the U.S., this means that 1 in 10 residents will be watching 4K online compared with just 1one in 500 this year. While connected TV will be the dominant channel, viewership will take place through a range of devices, including smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

The new research found that although YouTube, Netflix and Amazon already offer some 4K video, network providers have been waiting for a critical mass of content to become available before launching their own 4K offer. However, 2016 has seen roll-out of a number of new 4K offerings, such as the launch of the Sky Q 4K service in the UK, coupled with...

A new study from Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found that the global value of contactless POS (point of sale) terminal transactions, conducted in-store via cards, mobile and wearables, will approach $500 billion annually by 2017; this is up from an estimated $321 billion this year.

However, the low value nature of contactless payments means that it will only represent just 5% of the total value of all POS transactions in 2017. According to the research group, the surge in contactless-enabled POS terminals in 2015, allied to retailer obligations to card companies in many markets to ensure that all terminals will be contactless ready by 2020, is likely to prompt an upsurge in migration to contactless payment. For example, Visa announced more than 3.2 million contactless terminals in Europe as of April 2016, up 23% from 2.6 million at the end of April 2015.

Contactless terminals...

MUSO (www.muso.com) — a content protection, data-analytics and piracy audience reconnection solutions provider — reveals nearly three-quarter of all visits to film and TV specific piracy sites in 2015 used web streaming as their method of consuming illegal content, highlighting a clear piracy audience trend change away from content 'ownership' using P2P/Torrents or web downloads.

These findings are from MUSO's “Global Film & TV Piracy Market Insight Report 2016,” which saw the company analyze global traffic from 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites, comprising of over 141 billion visits to these sites, and across 200m measured devices.

Out of a total 78.49 billion film and television piracy site visits, 73.69% (57.84 billion) were visits to streaming sites, with 72.07% of visits via desktop devices, indicating consumption of infringing video content via mobile devices remains low. With over 12% (9.86...

The worldwide smart phone market grew modestly in the second quarter (Q2 2016) after a disappointing first quarter, according to the Canalys (www.canalys.com) research group.

Global shipments reached over 330 million units, with Samsung leading the market with shipments around 80 million units. A disappointing quarter a year ago led to favorable annual comparisons, while shipments were flat compared with Q1.

“The success of the Galaxy S7 together with a de-emphasis on the low end of its portfolio has led to a rise in handset ASP [average sales price],” says Canalys Senior Analyst Tim Coulling. ‘“Samsung’s VR move has proved a wise one, with Gear VR bundles helping boost flagship handset sales.”

Apple shipped 40 million iPhones in Q2, a second consecutive annual decline in shipments.

“The launch of the iPhone SE has done little to improve Apple’s fortunes,” said Canalys Analyst Rushabh Doshi...

New data from Parks Associates (www.parksassociates.com) finds that less than 5% of U.S. broadband households own a smart appliance such as a full-sized refrigerator, oven, dishwasher, or washer/dryer that can be monitored or controlled using a smartphone, tablet, or computer. However, the research shows 18% of consumers plan to buy a smart appliance in the next 12 months.

"Smart appliances have generated lots of attention, but market adoption is low due to low product availability, higher costs, and use cases that do not address customer needs," said Tom Kerber, director, Research, Home Controls & Energy, Parks Associates. Purchase intentions of major appliances that can be connected to the Internet have grown from 9% in early 2014 to 18% in late 2015. However, the fact that actual adoption rates are far lower reflects a disconnect in the industry.”

Recipe apps and features get lots of...

By Rick Sutcliffe

The Spy is late again with this column. His reason is the first encounter.

Some time back a tree trunk some seventy-five centimetres thick broke off a big leaf maple some 10 metres up and fell across his neighbour's barbed wire fence. Fortunately cattle no longer graze there, so nothing escaped. His tree, his responsibility, so after recovering from painkillers following dental surgery (another encounter with technology), he cranked up his Stihl 261 chain saw (yet another) and bucked the part that was over the fence.

Over the August long weekend he was moving some of that wood in preparation for stocking his woodshed when he had a close encounter with a band of hornets, several of which got into his hardhat and pin cushioned his scalp. Others chased him until out of the woods, the orchard and nearly back to the house, where he opened the door, asked wife Joyce (of 47 years) for Advil and water, fetched a chair to the driveway...

New data from Parks Associates (www.parksassociates.com) says that controller and 26% will have a home security system.

"Companies such as Samsung are beginning to embed smart home controllers into their consumer entertainment products, meaning consumers who buy a smart TV or smart appliance will be bringing these solutions into their homes, often without understanding the full extent of their capabilities," said Tom Kerber, Director, Research, Home Controls & Energy, Parks Associates. "These smart home capabilities will come into play as consumers adopt other smart home devices, such as smart lighting and IP cameras." 

Parks Associates research shows:

° Unit sales of IP cameras will reach nearly 6 million in 2016, including 3.2 million first-time sales.

° By 2017, the number of replacement or additional IP camera sales will exceed the number of first-time sales.

° ...

Worldwide security software revenue totaled $22.1 billion in 2015, a 3.7% increase in from 2014, according to Gartner, Inc.

Security information and event management (SIEM) remained the fastest-growing segment in 2015, with 15.8 % growth, while consumer security software showed the sharpest decline at 5.9% year-on-year. In 2015, the top five vendors together accounted for 37.6% of the security software revenue market share, down 3.1 percentage points from 2014. These vendors also displayed a collective decline of 4.2% in 2015, while the rest of the market (Others) grew strongly at 9.2% year-on-year.

"The below-market growth seen by these large vendors with complex product portfolios is in contrast to the market growth and disruption being introduced by smaller, more specialized security software vendors," said Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Symantec maintained the No. 1 position despite the company suffering its third consecutive year of...

A recent Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com) survey found that 41% of surveyed IT professionals believe their IT organization to be ready for the digital business of the next two years. Twenty nine percent of those surveyed said that engagement with the demands of digital business would be their primary duty or a significant part of their duties.

In the first quarter of 2016, Gartner surveyed 948 Gartner clients across 30 countries. Those surveyed were IT professionals representing many job categories and technology disciplines and were asked about their role in their organization’s efforts to transform itself in order to meet the challenges of digital business.

"IT professionals indicate that their investment priorities, infrastructure changes, skills development and business-IT interactions are in flux, and that they are unsure how their IT organization will make it through any digital transformation," said...

A new report from Parks Associates (www.parksassociates.com) estimates global mobile data revenue will increase from $386 billion in 2015 to $630 billion in 2020, with most of the revenue growth in the Asia & Pacific region and the rest of the world.

The research group says North America and Western Europe will see only minimal growth, and in the U.S. especially, alternatives such as Wi-Fi have drawn consumer interest to reduce their mobile data bills. Cable operators are promoting Wi-Fi hotspots, and roughly 70% of U.S. mobile consumers are interested in Wi-Fi-only data plans.

"The IoT [Internet of Things] market represents significant revenue potential for mobile operators, who are looking to the IoT to complement traditional smartphone-driven mobile data revenues," said Harry Wang, senior director of Research, Parks Associates. "5G data service ARPU has limited room for expansion from...

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to be flat in 2016, totaling $3.41 trillion, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). This is up from last quarter's forecast of negative 0.5 percent growth. The change in the forecast is mainly due to currency fluctuations, notes the research group.

"The current Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast assumes that the U.K. would not exit the European Union. With the U.K.'s exit, there will likely be an erosion in business confidence and price increases which will impact U.K., Western Europe and worldwide IT spending," said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner.

While the U.K. has embarked on a process to change, that change is yet to be defined. The "leave" vote will quickly affect IT spending in the U.K. and in Europe while other changes will take longer. Staff may be the largest immediate issue. The long-term uncertainty in work status will make the...

According to the latest forecast from IDC (www.idc.com), total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches) for deployment in cloud environments will increase by 15.5% in 2016 to reach $37.1 billion. This amount excludes double counting between storage and servers, according to the research group.

In comparison, spending on enterprise IT infrastructure deployed in traditional, non-cloud, environments will decline by 4.4% in 2016, but will still account for the largest share, 63.4%, of end user spending. Spending on private cloud IT infrastructure will grow by 10.3% year over year to $13.8 billion with more than 60% of this amount contributed by on-premises private cloud environments. Spending on public cloud IT infrastructure will increase by 18.8% in 2016 to $23.3 billion.

All regions are expected to increase spending on cloud IT infrastructure in 2016 with investments...

According to a new research report from the analyst firm of Berg Insight (www.berginsight.com), the installed base of wireless IoT [Internet of Things] devices in industrial automation reached 14.3 million in 2015.

The number of wireless IoT devices in automation networks is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.7% to reach 62.0 million by 2021. There is a wide range of wireless technologies used in industrial automation with different characteristics and use cases. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are the most widespread technologies in factory automation while cellular connectivity typically is used for remote monitoring and backhaul communication between plants.

The increasing popularity of Ethernet based networks in factory automation is one of the key drivers for the popularity of Wi-Fi in such applications. 802.15.4 based standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a are major...

Juniper Research (www.juniperresearch.com) has found that smart traffic management and smart parking initiatives, will save some 4.2 billion man-hours annually by 2021 — equivalent to each city driver saving nearly an entire working day per year.

Juniper found that while the “smart city” remains a relatively young concept, many cities are beginning to recognize the need to improve in terms of competitiveness and quality of life. Increasing urban populations are creating pressure on city resources, driving the need for new and efficient solutions. Indeed, Juniper notes that the smart city concept is now a global phenomenon.

Juniper’s study found that traffic easing measures are at the forefront of many smart cities’ efforts. Key to those considerations are the establishment of viable public transport networks to replace private vehicle use.

Meanwhile other measures, such as the twi...

The total worldwide PC monitor market shipped more than 29 million units in the first quarter of 2016 (1Q16), up 0.5% year over year but a decrease of 5.7% compared to the previous quarter, according to new data from IDC (www.idc.com).


The research group expects the global monitor market will continue to decline at rates around 3% year over year from 2018 through 2020. However, there should be some pockets of growth along the way, as illustrated by the Middle East and Africa region, which experienced its second sequential gain in a row, recording 3.8% quarter-over-quarter growth in 1Q16, said Maura Fitzgerald, senior research analyst.

IDC currently forecasts 114 million PC monitor units will be shipped for full year 2016 and expects to see a year-over-year decline of 7.4% in worldwide shipments to 27.1 million units in the first quarter of 2017. By 2020, worldwide shipments are expected to be less than 100 million...

By Rick Sutcliffe

The Spy is a wee bit late with this column. Too many birthdays in the last few days--Canada's on the first, the Excited States on the fourth and his own on the third. "How old?" his reader asks. It is a number in like class as the year 1961.

WWDC was somewhat a yawner, pretty much in accord the Spy's own predictions in his last column--no new products ready to sell, many software advances, and none of his maybe long shots became a reality--yet. Speaking of which, perhaps he will attend next year. Things then might be more interesting then.

Brexit was a surprise to some people. Perhaps with the polls indicating a remain side win, too many chose not to vote. Lots of consequences: accusations of fascism and racism, petitions for reconsidering, a hard negotiating stance from the EU (which holds all the cards), some flight of money that now gooses North American stock markets, political careers...

By 2020, a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare as a "no-internet" policy is today, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).

Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that dominated many large providers in recent years. Today, most provider technology innovation is cloud-centric, with the stated intent of retrofitting the technology to on-premises.

"Aside from the fact that many organizations with a no-cloud policy actually have some under-the-radar or unavoidable cloud usage, we believe that this position will become increasingly untenable," said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. "Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment.
The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud.”

This does not mean that everything will be cloud-based, and concern...

Forty-two percent of organizations expect to increase spending on mobile app development by an average of 31% in 2016, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). Despite this, the average proportion of the overall application development budget allocated to mobile is only 10%, a 2% decrease from 2015, notes the research group.

The Gartner survey of IT and business leaders responsible for mobile strategy and/or custom mobile app development within their organizations was conducted in September 2015 across the United States, EMEA, Latin America and Asia/Pacific. The survey focused on understanding organizations' activities in mobile app development, covering both business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) apps.

"Demand for mobile apps in the enterprise is growing, but the urgency to scale up mobile app development doesn't yet appear to be a priority for most organizations...

New research from Parks Associates (www.parksassociates.com) shows that consumers are steadily increasing their gaming activities on streaming media players, which includes form factors such as streaming sticks and boxes.

The research firm reveals that among U.S. broadband households with at least one Internet-connected device, 26% use their streaming media player as their primary device to access online video content. These households spend an average of 1.3 hours per week gaming on their streaming media players.

"Gaming consoles were once the dominant platform for accessing online content, but today, only 32% of U.S. broadband households with at least one Internet-connected CE device use their gaming console as their primary platform," said Barbara Kraus, director of Research, Parks Associates. "Gaming consoles are still in the lead, but smart TVs are a close second at 28%, with streaming...

New data from Parks Associates (www.parksassociates.com) finds that 23% of Millennial heads of household are OTT-only households, higher than the national average of 15% among all U.S broadband households.

The firm's analysts also note that 61% of Millennials subscribe to both pay-TV and OTT services, also higher than the national average of 52%. Other key points from the Parks Associates OTT research:

° Nearly 60% of OTT video services in the North American market are subscription-based.

° 64% of U.S. broadband households subscribe to an OTT video service, up from 59% in 2015.

° Average monthly spending on Internet-based subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services among U.S. broadband households increased from $3.71 per month in 2012 to $6.19 per month in 2015.

° Approximately 20% of U.S. broadband households cancelled at least one OTT video service in 2015.

° 5...

Over 110 million enterprise smartphones and tablets were shipped worldwide in the first quarter [Q1] 2016, according to Strategy Analytics (www.strategyanalytics.com). W

Worldwide business smartphone shipments for Q1 2016 fell to 92.2 million units, down 21.0% from the previous quarter and up 0.5% annually from 91.8 million in Q1 2015; while the worldwide business tablet market fell to 17.3 million unit shipments in Q1 2016, down 34.5% sequentially from 26.4 million units in Q4 2015 and down 9.8% annually from 19.1 million in Q1 2015, according to the research group. Weakening global smartphone and tablet demand, slowing economy, and piling-up inventory were hammering the growth of both BYOD and corporate-liable markets in the first quarter of the year.

"Many enterprises withheld from investing in new deployments of smartphones in Q1 2016 and inventory built-up due to large volume...