Through our daily work with leading operators, equipment suppliers, service providers, investors and other interesting players in the telecom and internet industries we gain knowledge, insights and inspiration for our annual crystal balling on what’s lying ahead. So also this year. 2012 has been a year of many good things, but other than continued mega growth in mobile data usage no significant move or shake has occurred. Media has been pre-occupied by lawsuits and countersuits between the largest handset vendors, none of which is really moving the industry forward. What moves the industry forward is however a continued LTE build-out, in both coverage and users. This year saw LTE deployments continue at pace in more and more countries, and now also the traditional first-mover UK finally joined the party. Now, for 2013, to summarize our key predictions; We will see operators requiring less small cells thanks to LTE’s improved indoor coverage; The snowballing market power of device vendors may deviate mobile R&D focus away from networks and open standards; European regulators to increasingly accept operator consolidation and network sharing in order to boost the LTE market; Outsourcing and Managed Services will become more focused on promoting vendors to actively address operator network OPEX as a whole; And, to round it off, Operators are going to face a rising rivalry from Microsoft, and IT players, in the enterprise communications market.