The U.S. and North America have led global smart grid expansion, but North America’s smart grid rollout peaked in 2011, with the region’s annual smart meter shipments forecast by Pike to fall sharply. North American smart electricity meter unit shipments will fall to 7.2 million by 2013, down from 12.4 million last year, a 42% drop in just two years. Pike foresees a gradual rise in unit shipments from 2014 through the end of the decade.

“The global smart meter market is in the midst of a steady growth period, with unit shipments growing at a compound annual growth rate of just under 5% between 2010 and 2020,” says vice president Bob Gohn.

“However, this high-level view obscures very dynamic and even volatile regional market characteristics, with dramatic shifts over the forecast period and very different communications technologies and standards. These swings make the market both enticing and challenging for smart meter and communications vendors.”

Just as the North American is set for a period of decline, the European smart grid electricity meter market is poised for dramatic growth, according to Pike’s “Smart Meters” report. Smart electricity meter shipments in the Asia-Pacific will continue to outpace those of all other regions. Major deployments in China, “utilizing a different breed of smart meter technology,” will drive growth in the region, where smart electricity meter penetration is just over half that in North America.

Smart electricity meter penetration in Europe is less than half that in the U.S. Penetration in Europe and Asia-Pacific will gain ground during the next eight years, with penetration rates reaching 64% in the former and nearly 70% in the latter, Pike forecasts.

Electric, gas and water utilities are turning to public cellular networks for smart grid systems’ communications, according to another recently released Pike Research report, which forecasts that global annual service revenue from public cellular network nodes in smart grid applications will exceed $1 billion by 2020.

There are two aspects of the wireless industry of significance to the U.S. economy– the supply side and the demand side, the report authors write in the study’s overview. “On the supply side, the wireless industry is responsible for increasing U.S. GDP, employment and government revenues. On the demand side, the wireless industry improves the productivity of U.S. businesses through wireless voice and data services.”

Highlights of Recon’s “The Wireless Industry: The Essential Engine of US Economic Growth” include:

• The US wireless industry is responsible for 3.8 million jobs, directly and indirectly, an increase of more than 200,000 over the past six years; this accounts for 2.6% of all US employment.

• The wireless industry retained $146.2 billion in GDP in the US (and generated $195.5 billion in economic activity globally) in the 12 months from July 2010 to June 2011.

• At $195.5 billion, the wireless broadband industry would rank as the 46th largest economy in the world, as measured by GDP.

• The wireless industry is now larger than the publishing, agriculture, hotels and lodging, air transportation, motion picture and recording, and motor vehicle manufacturing industry segments and rivals the computer systems design services and oil and gas extraction industries.

• The wireless industry and its direct and indirect employees paid $88.6 billion in taxes, including federal, state and local fees and taxes.

• The consumer surplus, the difference between what end users are willing to pay and what they have to pay for services, was $502.7 billion in 2010.

• According to Kantar Media, telecom has been the second largest advertising category in the United States for the last several years running and has two of the four largest advertisers in the country.

• European Union wireless penetration continues to outpace the U.S., with the EU reaching 126.2% at the end of 2009 and the US reaching 102.4% penetration in June 2011.

The IEEE-SA working group’s IEEE 159.1-2012 — “Standards for Testing and Performance for Optical Ground Wire (OPGW)” is being used in smart grid deployments to provide both grounding capabilities for transmissions lines and communications back to utility systems such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), the IEEE explains.

The three new standards development initiatives are:

• IEEE P1909.1™ – Recommended Practice for Smart Grid Communication Equipment -Test methods and installation requirements – is intended to document testing and installation procedures that are geared specifically for communications equipment to be installed in various domains of the smart grid, such as generation, transmission and distribution. Safety, electromagnetic capability (EMC), environmental and mechanical tests are to be covered in the recommended practice, toward the goal of improving the safety and reliability of a wide range of smart-grid communications equipment.

• IEEE P1703™ – Standard for Local Area Network/Wide Area Network (LAN/WAN) Node Communication Protocol to complement the Utility Industry End Device Data Tables – is intended to improve the cost efficiency and flexibility of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments. The standard is being developed to define uniform, managed, adaptive and secure network data and message delivery for plug-and-play, multi-source utility meters, home appliances, communication technology and other ancillary devices.

• IEEE P1854™ – Guide for Smart Distribution Applications Guide – is being developed to categorize and describe important smart distribution applications and fill a gap for standardized definitions of such systems. The guide is intended to cover advanced automation and SCADA systems for reliability improvement, outage management, fault location and management, voltage and var management, distributed-resource and renewable-generation integration, demand response, advanced protection, equipment diagnostics and asset management, real-time simulation for system optimization, microgrids and many other applications.

“Many of the benefits that the world hopes to achieve through smart-grid development—such as empowering greater consumer choice in energy use, improving the reliability of power generation and distribution and more efficiently meeting skyrocketing power demand—are dependent on integrating significantly more robust systems for communications and distribution automation,” said Dr. W. Charlton Adams Jr., past president of the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA).

More information is available on the IEEE’s Standards Insight Blog.

Individual and business cellular service subscribers are now primed to make the jump from 3G to 4G devices and services, “there are still some teething issues that will need to be worked through,” according to ABI’s research findings.

According to some cellular service operators in Western Europe, customers are not signing up for 4G mobile devices and subscription services in droves, even though they’re aware of and recognize the higher speeds and performance 4G offers, ABI notes. Features such as high-definition (HD) video streaming and “richer, more interactive/immersive social networking and gaming experiences, should coax 3G customers to migrate to 4G,” ABI believes.

Adding to 4G’s impetus, is increasing competitive pressure on mobile device vendors, the outcome of which is likely to bring down LTE handset prices, which are expected to fall 10%-20% over the next two years.

4G LTE is on the ascendancy, while WiMAX is on the wane, according to ABI. “4G devices are expected to generate 87 million in unit sales in 2012, up 294% year-on-year,” stated Jake Saunders, ABI vice president of forecasting. “The lion’s share of the market is now backing LTE as service provider and vendor support has fallen away from WiMAX.”

A 4G mobile device isn’t much of an improvement without adequate 4G network infrastructure, the flipside of the 4G equation, ABI cautions. “As evidenced by the Australian iPad 3 promotion fiasco, when iPad 3s were being promoted as being ‘LTE-ready,’ even though the modem is unable to access the Australian LTE spectrum band, the number of LTE spectrum bands will hamper initial pricing and product roll-out,” comments Philip Solis, research director, mobile devices.

“Nevertheless, in addition to 61 million 4G handsets being shipped in 2012, we estimate 26 million 4G non-handset products will be shipped. In the short-term, most of that will reflect customers purchasing USB dongles for legacy laptops and netbooks, followed by customer premise equipment, or home modem, purchases.”

Though just 2% of US tablet sales took place in rural markets in 2011, iGR forecasts that tablet purchases by rural area residents will account for 11% of total U.S. tablet sales by 2016.

Since Apple’s 2010 introduction of the iPad, tablet sales have grown to reach 28.1 million as of year-end 2011, iGR notes. In conducting its research on the tablet phenomenon, it’s found that rural U.S. consumers are some 20% less likely to own a tablet as compared to their urban or suburban counterparts.

Three factors will drive growing rural tablet sales and usage in the US in the next five years, according to iGR’s “U.S. Regional Tablet Market Forecast, 2011-2016“:

• Increased availability of tablet devices at lower price points and across venues (e.g., wireless carriers, big box retailers, electronics retailers,etc.)
• Improved tablet quality and thus capability
• Growing adoption of tablets into many a U.S. user’s lifestyle both at work/school and at home

“iGR has consistently found that younger, well off college graduates tend to buy tablets,” said Iain Gillott, iGR president and founder, a market research consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile industry. “But also those in urban (including suburban) regions tend to buy more tablets as compared to their rural counterparts. Over the next few years, as consumers find more uses for tablets in their work and personal lives, iGR expects the growth of tablets in rural markets to outstrip sales growth in urban and suburban areas.”

The Wi-SUN Alliance members are Analog Devices, Fuji Electric, Murata Manufacturing, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Omron Corp., Osaki Electric, Renesas Electronics and Silver Spring Networks.

“We are excited by the strong industry interest we’ve seen,” said Wi-SUN Alliance Founder co-Chairs Hiroshi Harada, director of NICT’s Smart Wireless Laboratory, and Raj Vaswani, CTO for Silver Spring Networks. “World-class companies are coming together to define common technology, certification, and promotion programs which will provide a true global standard for wireless Smart Utility Network expansion and the interoperability of devices.”

Wi-SUN intends to establish a certification body and processes to ensure the connectivity and interoperability of battery-operated wireless devices in Smart utility networks. The first certification test specifications are expected by this summer. IEEE 802.15.4g Task Group chairman Phil Beecher has been chosen to lead the initiative as Wi-SUN Alliance chairman.

At least one smart home product or service will be found in more than 8% of U.S. homes by the end of 2012, the most popular being “self-controlled and self-monitoring systems like video cameras, motion sensors, lighting and thermostats,” according to, “Smart Home Systems and Services Forecast: United States.”

“The proliferation of both fixed and mobile broadband connectivity, coupled with service provider need to develop additional revenue generating units (RGUs) to offset declining growth in traditional businesses, is driving adoption of a broad array of smart home systems and services,” Bill Ablondi, director of Strategy Analytics’ Smart Home Strategies advisory service, commented.

Smart home hardware sales in the U.S. will generate $4.8 billion in 2012, up from $3 billion in 2011. Strategy Analytics foresees this growing to $13 billion come 2017. Smart home services and installation revenues will total $2.8 billion in 2012, double 2011′s $1.9 billion, with revenue forecast to increase nearly six-fold, to $11.3 billion, in 2017.

The home systems and services report also covers emerging opportunities in other smart home services, such as digital health systems and smart appliances.

ADSL2/2+, otherwise known as ITU G.992.3 and G.992.5, respectively, are two international telecoms standards. ADSL2 extend basic ADSL data rats to 12 megabit/second (Mbps) downstream and up to 2.5 Mbps upstream by making use of improved modulation techniques. ADSL2+ doubles the number of downstream bits basic ADSL is capable of, achieving data rates as high as 24 Mbps downstream and up to 1.4 Mbps upstream.

Lantiq’s XWAY ARX300 device family is the first in the telecom semiconductor industry to offer a GigE (Gigabit Ethernet) switch and PHY (OSI Model Physical Layer) plus WLAN integration on an ADSL SoC, according to the company.

“ADSL is the prevailing broadband access technology. In 2011, over half of all broadband access CPE shipments (including DSL, Cable and FTTH) and more than 85% of DSL devices were ADSL CPEs, according to the recent Infonetics’ Broadband CPE Market Tracker,” Lantiq notes.

“With more than 50 million CPE shipments annually worldwide, ADSL will continue to be the largest broadband access device category throughout the forecast horizon 2012 to 2015.”

Lantiq’s XWAY ARX300 products are now available for engineering development with key customers, the company says. Volume production to support customer roll-outs is to begin in 4Q.

On the national level, cable companies proved much more successful than telcos when it came to adding new broadband subscribers last year: the top cable companies netted 75% of 2011 broadband additions. The top broadband providers’ total subscriber base now totals 78.6 million, according to Leichtman’s research.

“Despite a high level of broadband penetration in the US, the top broadband providers added 88% as many subscribers in 2011 as in 2010,” president and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman commented. “At the end of 2011, the top broadband providers in the US cumulatively had over 78.6 million subscribers, an increase of nearly 25 million over the past five years.”

Other key findings included in the report include:

• The top cable companies added 2.3 million broadband subscribers in 2011 — 98% of the total net additions for the top cable companies in 2010
• The top telephone providers added 750,000 broadband subs in 2011 — 68% of the total net additions for the top telephone companies in 2010
• In the fourth quarter of 2011, cable and telephone providers added 765,000 broadband subscribers — with cable companies accounting for 82% of the broadband additions in the quarter.

“World IPv6 Launch will mark the largest industry commitment to and deployment of IPv6 in the history of the Internet,” according to a UNH-IOL press release. “As the successor to the current Internet Protocol, IPv4, IPv6 is critical to the Internet’s continued growth as a platform for innovation and economic development,” according to Internet Society, which is organizing the event.

UNH-IOL will verify IPv6 functionality for home gateway equipment for World IPv6 Launch. In order to participate, vendors will need to enable IPv6 ‘on by default’ across the range of their home router products and have a product that has completed the IPv6 Ready CE Router (CPE) Interoperability Test Scenario at UNH-IOL.

Founded in 1988, UNH-IOL provides independent, broad-based interoperability and standards compliance testing for data, telecommunications and storage networking products and technologies.

Additional information regarding registration for the Home Router IPv6 testing and participating in World IPv6 Launch are available by clicking here