As traditional, and even more modern, network architectures struggle to cope with more dynamic applications and services, another acronym has emerged as a possible answer to operators’ challenges. But ask ten different industry pundits what SDN (software defined networking) means and you will likely get ten different answers. At the time of writing, telecoms.com had just published a poll offering a variety of definitions, the clear leader of which was “other”—effectively meaning something else not on the list.

Four out of five European enterprises describe themselves as very or somewhat interested in adopting Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), reflecting rapidly increasing or spiking bandwidth requirements faced today as well as the need for a more cost-effective connectivity model. The findings were published this week in a survey carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of network specialist Ciena.

Cloud services will be one of the key revenue generators for operators over the next 24 months, according to data from the Telecoms.com Intelligence Industry Survey 2013, with over 80 per cent of respondents expecting operators to own their own cloud infrastructure within the next two years. Over 90 per cent expect operators to be selling cloud services within the same time frame.

Although only about 12 per cent of respondents think more than 50 per cent of operators worldwide will own their own cloud infrastructure by 2015, the majority think between 11 and 30 per cent will have some kind of cloud platform in place.

Just over ten years ago I went backpacking in Brazil for a month with some friends. We arrived in Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s great party towns, at nightfall and found, to our dismay, that we couldn’t get a caipirinha for love nor money. It turned out that we’d landed on the day of the presidential elections and there was a blanket ban on sales of alcohol because the authorities were concerned that violence might erupt if politics mixed with booze.

Eventually we managed to persuade a man running one of the street food outlets on the Copacabana beach to sell us a beer. He told us that the winner of the election would be a man known as Lula. Lula, leader of PT, the worker’s party, went on to become perhaps the most popular president in the history of Brazil, introducing sweeping social reforms designed to lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty.

It’s becoming a cliché in TV land that content-rights restrictions, and not technology, are slowing the pace of industry development. At CES, Boxee and Dish demonstrated workarounds that have allowed them to offer two products frequently blocked by rights issues; namely cloud-based DVRs and out-of-home live TV viewing.

Connected cars represent an exciting evolution for consumers, car manufacturers and mobile operators alike. There are already over one billion cars on the world’s roads today, according to research firm Ward’s Auto, and that number is expected to continue growing as more consumers in emerging markets get onto the roads. Automotive manufacturers have already put plans into action to ensure, that in the coming years, the majority of new cars will be equipped with broadband connectivity.

It’s been a year for serious cloud investments and networking specialist Cisco has closed out 2012 with a $1.2bn outlay on privately held cloud management company Meraki.

Having missed the 3G boat, Cisco is attempting to make an impression in the telco space by using its IP expertise to cash in on the migration to endto- end IP architecture brought in with LTE. At the same time, however, specialist telecom equipment providers are developing their own ‘Cisco killer’ switching infrastructure.

We want to know what you are thinking.

Our readers are the people shaping the industry; negotiating its obstacles, managing its challenges and creating its successes. What you believe about the state of your industry, and the near-term future that awaits it, offers some of the most valuable insight in the market.

The survey will be wide reaching in scope, designed to gauge the status of the industry from one side to the other. The BCN and telecoms.com editorial team will turn the raw data from the survey into a series of reports and features that will be published on telecoms.com and in Mobile Communications International magazine.

We’ll hold a mirror up to the industry, show it how it looks at itself, where it is succeeding and where it thinks it might be going wrong.

To thank you for your valuable time, everybody who completes the survey will receive a free copy of the report and will automatically be entered into our prize draw with two new Apple iPads up for grabs. The more of our readers who fill out the survey – the more accurate reflection we can give! The winners will to be announced at Mobile World Congress 2013.

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With traditional network architectures struggling to cope with more dynamic applications and services, software-defined networking (SDN) provides the answer to operators’ challenges, according to research firm Ovum. The company believes SDN will be key in enabling future networks to become more flexible, scalable and intelligent.

Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has announced it will use local infrastructure vendor Ericsson’s Connected Vehicle Cloud solution in order to allow drivers, passengers and the car to connect to services available in the cloud.