Dr Hans- Jürgen Meckelburg, President & CEO, 7Layers, talks to telecoms.com at MWC 2013 about serving the M2M space and connecting millions of devices across many different sectors.

Of late there seems to be an SDN (software defined networks) related announcement every few days, as vendors get their ducks in a row to pitch the next evolution of technology to carriers at MWC. But the concept demands a change in mindset for the vendors as much as it does the operators.

It feels like 2006 once again: vendors are creating fanciful and colourful presentations about SDN and operators are discussing about the need to move from silos to horizontal platforms and networks. In a way, almost the same story was told six years ago for IMS, but deployments were far smaller than expected. So is SDN following the footsteps of IMS?

As many of the world’s operators contend with the capacity crunch, some carriers are finding new purpose and a potential goldmine of use cases for legacy spectrum licenses.

It took a while, but the spectrum auction in the Netherlands is finally over. The mobile operators are essentially in a position to fully roll out 4G services, and as the regulator had desired, a fourth entrant is poised to come in and shake things up. But it’s worth remembering the old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same: increasing competition by adding a fourth operator may well result in one of the existing players exiting the market.

Tuesday marks the next important milestone in the UK’s telecoms market as prospective bidders submit applications for 4G spectrum.

Between 10:00 and 16:00 on December 11, 2012, interested parties are able to submit applications, accompanied by an initial deposit of £100,000 into Ofcom’s bank account. The passing of the deadline takes the UK one step closer to the completion of a highly controversial and long-awaited spectrum action, which is expected to be finalised by February or March next year.

Calls conducted on VoIP over LTE (VoLTE) consume twice as much power as those over a 2G CDMA network an investigation has found.