It is that time of the year again! Northstream's unique insight gained from advising some of the world's leading mobile operators, infrastructure vendors and device manufacturers on market strategy and sourcing has been the inspiration to yet a new set of predictions. Northstream believes 2012 will be a year of continued network investment, and one where the industry will begin to recover. In 2011, mobile infrastructure vendors hit rock bottom after seven years of declining infrastructure pricing. In 2012, we expect infrastructure vendors to bounce back as the market matures, sub-scale vendors become too financially constrained to continue the price war, and operators start to charge properly for data while also taking a more holistic view onsourcing of systems and services. LTE will help further, but we’ll only see a major breakthrough when support for a quality voice service is there. On the device side, we’re going to see SIMs shrink, enabling new types of connected devices and paving the way for soft SIMs with enhanced over-the-air provisioning of services and capabilities. Similarly, we will see the beginnings of a big change in the apps space as the ecosystem moves towards the cloud and the tight link between applications and OS weakens. We also see one overall trend outside of these five: that operators will invest seriously in customer experience, and those that do will establish competitive advantage and significantly reduce churn. For more details on the predictions for the year ahead, click the icons below.