Mobile service revenue remains the main telecom / datacom growth engine worldwide, led by the rise of mobile broadband, said Infonetics Research.

To avoid falling into the role of pipe provider, many service providers are deploying or weighing new architectural options such as caching/content delivery networks, distributed BRAS/BNG, next-gen central offices, distributed mini data centers, and video optimization.

Software-defined networks (SDNs) and network functions virtualization (NFV) have the attention of nearly all service providers, who are on the long road to widespread deployments.

Big data is becoming more manageable: Operators are leveraging subscriber and network intelligence to support marketing and loyalty strategies, churn management, and automation/optimization of networks using SDN and NFV.