Mobile congestion will become a major issue in emerging markets during 2013 as smartphones take root...

In my opinion, the three strongest trends in emerging markets in 2013 are:

• the service innovation that will deliver affordable Internet
• the data growth that will result from a growing user base, and
• the LTE networks that will deliver the data.

LTE compliant solutions will be heavily sought after to enable seamless roaming between 3G and the growing number of LTE networks...

The proliferation of LTE will be a major trend in 2013. There will be:

• faster launches of LTE
• growth in smartphone adoption

Green telecom will be the trend for 2013, along with a quest to serve the “Next Billion” mobile customers. In addition, the global data boom will force mobile operators to evalute their business models...

Fixed-mobile divergence is the top trend in 2013...

• Fixed-mobile divergence will be here to stay
• Sharing of networks
• Focus on advanced Operations Support Systems (OSS)

The key trend in 2013 will be the development of smarter mobile infrastructure. There will be...

• A new focus on antennas for base stations
• A quest to reduce signal wastage

The trend for 2013 will be True mobility in the workplace:

• A renewed focus on ‘total cost of ownership’ of mobile computers
• The emergence of Android as a valid operating system choice for mobile devices for enterprises

Mobile devices overtake desktops with...

• A shift to a device-driven and faster Internet
• Internet backup
• The ‘social' DDoS attack

In many emerging markets there is a need for more spectrum, both for backhaul and access. This is because there is a lot of growth and no alternative – GPON and DSL connections typically aren’t present, and they are often difficult to deploy in more remote regions. High-capacity last-mile solutions are far preferable to emerging market providers - spectrum is a scarce resource, so it’s important to find more intelligent ways to make use of it...

The top priority of any wireless provider is to make sure that the wireless signal from a device gets into the ground as soon as possible. To do this, it’s crucial to make efficient use of the available spectrum...

There has been a vast increase in data growth in most markets over the last few years, with rising mobile penetration in the rural regions of emerging markets often cited as a key driver for competitiveness.

This has lead to many discussions on how best to develop and promote mobile penetration in rural areas, with the most notable issues being those of infrastructure deployment and backhauling. Handling the boom in data-hungry services requires reliable networks that can offer increased capacity, but delivering such coverage to rural areas presents many challenges...

We are going through a radical shift in the way people work and use computers. Increasing availability and affordability of wireless broadband is giving the global workforce true mobility, for the first time in history. Many of them will use smartly designed mobile rugged computers for their everyday computing and communication needs, instead of traditional laptops.

The digital revolution has given rise to a literal explosion of data, as the volume of information shared, distributed and stored increases exponentially on a daily basis. An ever-growing list of regulatory compliance adds to the burden, generating masses of additional data that needs to be managed. This is further complicated by emerging trends such as big data, cloud data, change data capture, data integration, data analysis and so on...

Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the industry’s main opportunity every year to trumpet the achievements of mobile communications, great as these undoubtedly are. Indeed it has long been our belief that mobile phones are right up there with the Honda 125cc moped and Penicillin as technologies having the greatest transformative effect on the lives of people in the developing world...

Africa's journey into the age of the Knowledge Economy and telephonic communication has, until recently, been a laborious and slow process, all the while the rest of the world’s usage has only but boomed...

To start off the new year, we here at Developing Telecoms thought it would be interesting to take stock of the market and identify what the top telecom trends in emerging markets will be during 2012. We decided that the best way of doing this would be to ask the people who really know: top executives at network operators, services providers and equipment vendors who work in the market and are experiencing developments first hand...

“ITU Telecom World 2011 sets new paradigm for top-level networking and knowledge-sharing”. So said the announcement at the end of ITU Telecom World 2011 – but does it really? And what exactly was new about the paradigm for top level networking and knowledge sharing in Geneva?

Adoption of Unified Communications technology is reaching critical mass, corroborated by a report from In-Stat earlier this year that predicted small office spending on IP telephony would grow by 83 per cent in 2011...

African leaders have been advised to take social media, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, more seriously or potentially lose power...

The main challenge now in emerging markets is to deliver mobile internet affordably, both to urban elites and to presently unserved remote areas. To do this, operators will need to be innovative...

If there is such a thing as the hot topic in telecoms, Mobile World Congress is where you will find out about it. And right now the issue that is taking up more time than anything else in the minds and engineering departments of service providers as well as vendors it is the explosion of data over mobile networks...