According to a new research study done by The Insight Research Corporation, between companies and consumers, more than $37 billion over the next five years is expected to be spent on carrier provided Ethernet services. Given virtually all major data providers already have Ethernet services available, it is expected that the market will grow at a compounded rate of almost 25 percent year-over-year. This will yield an increase from approximately $3.1 billion in 2010 to approximately $9.7 billion by 2015.

According to this study, US enterprises demand for Ethernet services has not wained even through the recent economic recession. The report also projects the surge in demand will peak by 2011, and revenue growth rates will hit 29 percent on a compounded yearly basis as the economy improves. These Ethernet services are being marketed under several names including Ethernet, Ethernet access, transparent LAN, native LAN, GigE, Gigabit Ethernet, Ethernet private line, Ethernet virtual private line, metro Ethernet, Layer 2 virtual private network, and virtual private LAN.

“The momentum behind retail sales of Ethernet services to the enterprise is being driven by the customer’s steadily increasing demand for data bandwidth and Ethernet’s real cost advantages in terms of providing flexible bandwidth and scalability that is superior to many competitive services,” says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research. “The driving force behind wholesale Ethernet sales is improved interoperability among carriers, greater confidence in emerging and recently adopted standards, as well as shifts by more carriers to a more wholesale-friendly posture,” Rosenberg concluded.

Qualcomm [NASDAQ: QCOM] has agreed to sell is FLO solution for mobile broadcast TV to AT & T [NYSE: T] of 1.92 billion U.S. dollars. The underlying FLO TV spectrum is at the bottom 700 MHz frequency, and spans more than 300 million customers in the United States. AT & T said it intends to implement the spectrum as a supplemental downlink in connection with their deployment of 4G mobile broadband networks, to reap the benefits of the capacity to meet the demand for large amounts of multimedia content. The companies plan for the transaction to close 2nd half of 2011.

It was reported that Qualcomm spent 683 million U.S. dollars to acquire the FLO TV spectrum, which covers more than 70 million people in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco (12MHz of spectrum D and E block ), along with more than 230 million people around the rest of the country (6MHz spectrum block D). Qualcomm says it has invested a total of about $ 800 million from the spectrum, network development and marketing to launch the FLO network TV less than 1 million customer records. Qualcomm is anticipating additional costs of $125-175 million in fiscal 2011 from the FLO TV business.

FLO TV offers live and delayed broadcast content providers including ESPN, CNN, MTV, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. FLO TV was only available in limited markets at first, but it was all over the country in mid-2009 at the key moment of transition from analog to digital. Qualcomm’s FLO TV service will finished on the 27th of March, 2010.

In December, Google announced it would delay its decision on the choice of which city will allow a sampling of their products broadband network to 1 Gbps to early 2011. It said the reason for this delay was basically a bunch of applications received.

In early 2010 Google announced a plan to start building a fiber network that supports data transfer speed Internet over 1 gigabit per second. This is more than 100 times the normal residential speed of broadband connections, paving the way for much more robust application delivery, especially in the areas of games and video.

Google plans to test the initial offering of this network of between 50,000 and 500,000 households in the U.S. Google accepted the offers of cities and individuals looking to test the offer, setting off a frenzied response. Even government officials sprang into action in an effort to attract the attention of Google. The bidding process was closed in March 2010, but not before nearly 200,000 people and over 1,100 municipalities had applied.

Google said the initial plan was to announce the winning entry/entries at the end of 2010, but with only a couple of weeks left in 2010, Google has not yet made it’s choice. “While we are moving full steam ahead on this project, we’re not quite ready to make that announcement,” said Milo Medin, VP of Google’s Internet access services. Medina continued, “We’re sorry for this delay, but we want to make sure we get this right.”

Currently, Google hopes to make its selection in early 2011.