Mobile payments are set to continue their growth throughout 2013...

Innovative services offered via mobile in emerging markets will continue to flourish in 2013...

Among service providers in emerging markets, there is a steady demand for more bandwidth for access network infrastructure and mobile backhaul...

Unified communications will be a major trend among organisations in 2013, particularly in emerging markets...

According to World Telecom Labs (WTL) there have been a number of recurrent themes among emerging market operators across the last year...

An SMS revival is on the cards for 2013, according to Tyntec...

Spacecom operates its AMOS satellite fleet over Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Among the strongest trends in these markets are the use of satellite to ensure reliable communications for a growing number of enterprise and consumer users who expect high quality service options all the time and everywhere they go...

A richer mobile experience will be a defining trend in emerging markets during 2013...

Mobile will continue to enable innovative new services in emerging markets across 2013...

Increased demand for data-hungry content will be a major trend in 2013.

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

The first phase of a major submarine cable connecting Africa to Europe is now operational...

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

Civil unrest following disputed presidential elections led to a contraction of Cote d'Ivoire's economy in 2011, but GDP growth is expected to rebound to 8% in 2012 with a stable outlook...

One of India’s major national operators is implementing a solution to provide real time subscription services for 2G and 3G subscribers including dynamic policy-based service offerings and a state-of-the-art service monitoring solutions on cloud...

Rising smartphone ownership in Africa is driving demand for high-bandwidth mobile data services such as video calling and online gaming...

Scandinavian operator Telenor has scaled back its Indian unit, stating that it intends to spend no more than INR155 billion (US$2.85 billion), with the goal of recouping this amount by the end of Q4 2013...

A new partnership is aiming to foster women’s entrepreneurship in the African mobile financial services industry...

India continues to be one of the fastest growing major telecom markets in the world, as well as one of the largest...

After just three days on sale in China, the iPhone 5 racked up sales of over 2 million, according to official sales figures published by Apple...

One the largest operators in Nigeria has successfully completed an LTE trial in the country’s capital city, Lagos...

The final toppling of Telkom’s stranglehold as the dominant last mile provider in South Africa was the biggest change to the IT landscape in 2012...

Thousands of people in the Philippines hit by Typhoon Pablo will be able to contact relatives and aid agencies will be able to carry out life-saving emergency work with the deployment of the Vodafone Foundation’s Instant Network today. Communications lines were cut when Typhoon Pablo hit the province on December 4, flattening buildings and damaging cell sites and telecoms transmission facilities...

The market-leading South African operator MTN has constructed its LTE network using equipment from Ericsson. This is the first commercial LTE network that the Swedish vendor has built in Africa. The launch comes after the pilot network has been running for more than a year...

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 Costa Rican regulator Sutel is implementing new systems to analyse and benchmark the performance of the country’s mobile network infrastructure...