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IDC Survey Spotlight: How Is 5G Being Embraced by U.S. Consumers, and How Do They View the Impact on Their Overall User Experience?

Jason Leigh, Jitesh Gera — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the current adoption of 5G among U.S. consumers and their perceptions of the impact of 5G on the mobile user experience. Drawing on IDC’s U.S. Consumer Communications and Mobile Services Survey (September 2026, n = 2,000), the analysis finds that 5G’s pervasive availability and robust marketing machine has driven wide-scale adoption and consumer beliefs about 5G’s superiority over legacy generations.

“5G delivers exceptional throughput and significantly lower latencies than LTE, but the mobile ecosystem (operators, network equipment providers, and app developers) continues to struggle in transforming those performance attributes into a differentiated user experience,” says Jason Leigh, research director, Wireless Services. “Instead, table stakes 5G functionality in U.S. smartphones and nationwide coverage have established a homogeneity of network performance that consumers expect, regardless of whether they discern a difference in app functionality or carrier experience.”

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Factors Do U.S. Consumers Use to Evaluate Their 5G Network Providers?

Jason Leigh, Jitesh Gera — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight assesses the top 5G-related factors U.S. consumers look for when choosing a mobile operator. While 5G carriers have long promoted 5G’s speed and latency, those performance traits have lost their power to sway buyers, who are now turning to foundational coverage and reliability to drive their decisions.

“Mobile operators used to sell consumers on the strength and availability of their 5G networks, but with the nuances of most ‘best network’ marketing claims difficult to discern for most, buyers fall back to what they know…network availability and reliability,” says Jason Leigh, research director, 5G & Wireless Services. “Mobile operators need to pivot from dangling speed and latency in front of consumers and begin proving more tangible-based arguments for their services based on the value that 5G brings, not just the performance.”

IDC Survey: SMB Communications Services Survey, 2026: Broadband & Wi-Fi

Daniela Rao — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presentation explores the key trends and drivers shaping broadband and Wi-Fi services among U.S. small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), based on survey findings collected in August 2026.

Market Share: Asia/Pacific Fabless Shares, 2025: Top 10 Ranking and Vendor Insight

Galen Zeng — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study examines the 2025 market shares of the leading vendors in the Asia/Pacific fabless market.

In 2025, the Asia/Pacific integrated circuit (IC) design (fabless) market continued to grow steadily driven by three forces: AI demand, a recovery in consumer electronics, and China's self-sufficiency policy. The market reached US$90.1 billion in 2025, up 13.9% year over year (YoY). AI infrastructure and intelligent edge applications have moved from an investment boom into volume production, becoming the core engine behind overall market growth.

"The Asia/Pacific fabless market showed strong momentum throughout 2025, driven by both the surge in AI compute demand and ongoing recovery in consumer electronics," says Galen Zeng, senior research manager, IDC. He adds, "China vendors, in particular, delivered better-than-expected growth, catalyzed by domestic substitution and AI demand, whereas Taiwan vendors continued to deepen their positions in AI applications and advanced process technology, reinforcing their global competitiveness. Looking ahead to 2026, against a backdrop of intensifying U.S.–China technology competition and continued tariff policy uncertainty, the Asia/Pacific IC design market remains resilient. IDC expects the market to reach US$102.7 billion in 2026, which will be a 14.0% YoY growth."

Ericsson 2026 Analyst Event: The Network as a Participant in AI Use Cases

Ahmad Latif Ali, Denise Lund, Paul Hughes, Brandon Butler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Ericsson's 2026 Analyst Event made it clear that the network is no longer just infrastructure for AI — it's becoming a co-participant in it. Ericsson is repositioning the network from infrastructure to a trust layer for AI, monetizing identity, location, and quality signals that pure-play CPaaS rivals can't replicate. The risk: Value scales only as fast as operators expose these APIs, and developers still expect open flexibility over network lock-in.

Telecom Infrastructure Modernization in Sub-Saharan Africa

Tolga Yalcin — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines the state of telecom network infrastructure modernization across Sub-Saharan Africa, covering 5G rollout, fiber and FTTx backhaul expansion, RAN and core virtualization, tower and infrastructure sharing, and the energy and currency constraints shaping network economics. The presentation profiles infrastructure investment patterns in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Côte d'Ivoire, and identifies three models through which operators are modernizing at scale: shared and coinvested build-out, regulatory-enabled competitive scale up, and network virtualization.

IDC PeerScape: Practices to Enhance Multi-Tool Endpoint Device Management Strategies

Phil Hochmuth — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape examines the endpoint device challenges faced by five global enterprises and the strategies they used to address those challenges. The document anonymizes all customer organizations and individuals. Companies are identified only by general industry and region; no company names, product names specific to the customer’s business, or individual names are disclosed.

“The diversity of endpoints used in business environments, and the spawning of subsequent software tools to manage these endpoint types, is making IT operations managers’ heads spin,” says Phil Hochmuth, research VP, Endpoint Device Management and Enterprise Mobility at IDC. “But enterprises are getting creative and innovative about tackling the problems of device management tool sprawl in their environments.”

Market Analysis Perspective: U.S. Mobile and Internet of Things Communications Services, 2026

Jitesh Gera — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the U.S. mobile and Internet of Things communications services market. It includes an overview of the current market landscape, a technology buyer perspective, a market outlook, and IDC's advice for technology suppliers in the market.

"Even as U.S. mobile penetration sits above 100% of the population, wireless services growth continues to defy expectations — driven less by new subscriber addition than by value engineering. Operators are converging fiber and mobile into unified bundles to raise stickiness and lower churn, while loosened credit requirements are accelerating the prepaid-to-postpaid migration, a shift that generally improves carriers' underlying economics. Intensifying rivalry among the "big three" is fueling more aggressive promotions — free phones, trade-ins, bundled streaming, and multiyear price locks — as carriers compete to deliver more perceived value at compressed price points. On the IoT side, GSMA's SGP.32 standard is emerging as the structural catalyst for enterprise-scale growth: U.S. business IoT cellular connections are forecast to grow at a 22.2% CAGR through 2029, dwarfing the market's already-steady 1.6% CAGR in consumer IoT." — Jitesh Gera, research manager, Wireless Services, IDC

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Endpoint Device Management and Enterprise Mobility, 2026

Phil Hochmuth — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the endpoint management and enterprise mobility market. It includes an overview of the current market landscape, a technology buyer perspective, a market outlook, and IDC's advice for technology suppliers.

The 2026 edition centers on the market's pivot from tool consolidation to autonomous endpoint management, examining why the time-to-patch gap persists despite widespread tactical AI adoption, how the convergence of IT operations and security operations is reshaping the buying center, and where Microsoft's Intune Suite bundling is compressing the addressable market for third-party suppliers.

"Endpoint management has spent a decade consolidating consoles, and 2026 is the year the market discovers that consolidation alone no longer moves the needle. Enterprises have adopted AI tactically across endpoint operations, yet roughly half still need a month or more to deploy a critical Windows patch — the gap between what our tools can see and what they will act on without a human is now the central problem in this market. Over the next three years, I expect the winners to be the platforms that earn trust incrementally, moving buyers from advisory to conditional to genuinely autonomous remediation, and that treat IT operations and security as one converged customer rather than two." — Phil Hochmuth, research vice president, Endpoint Management and Enterprise Mobility

Market Forecast: U.S. Mobile Consumer and Business Services Forecast, 2026-2030

Jason Leigh, Jitesh Gera — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides the five-year forecast for the U.S. mobile consumer and business services market and delivers insights into the drivers and inhibitors of growth.

Despite a saturated market, U.S. mobile connections continue to grow as consumers and businesses deepen their embrace of the digital experience and expand the number and types of devices they use to connect. DX initiatives and security concerns push business adoption ahead of consumer growth.

“Despite operating in a saturated market, U.S. mobile service providers continue to grow the total wireless subscriber base, with consumers diversifying their device types, and businesses--concerned about network and data security amid ongoing digital transformation initiatives--layering in more corporate-liable connections for their employees. At the heart of it all is a quiet, unacknowledged reality that 24 x 7 ubiquitous connectivity, far from being a mere commodity, is the quintessential foundation of modern society and the prerequisite for most future technological advances,” said Jason Leigh, research director, Wireless Services at IDC.