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Imagine 60 miles of shelving, full of obsolete videotape. Your mission: digitise it, index it, store it and distribute it. How hard can it be?

The volume of monthly mobile data traffic is set to exceed 15 exabytes globally by 2018, thanks to a surge in high-bandwidth content such as video calling and music streaming. The growth in bandwidth demand can also be attributed to other types of connected “things” that will require their share of networks too.

Stateside, we are told that our economy, with sluggish growth and unemployment hovering near 7%, may be the “new normal”. Underpinning this unnerving trend is a population with increasing numbers of workers whose outdated skillsets don’t match the digital economy.

The internet has changed significantly over the last few years. It is now an essential part of our society and vital for many of our day-to-day tasks. In fact, it seems that most of us cannot live without it.

Although international voice traffic continues to grow, wholesale margins are declining fast in an intensely competitive sector. Colt’s announcement back in May that it was withdrawing 85% of its carrier voice contracts is a perfect example of this trend. With this at the forefront of mind for all carriers, maximising revenues from core telecoms services – voice, SMS and data – is a priority.

Telecoms firms may be arriving late to the cloud market, but it is not too late for them to dominate the space and win business customers.

Since the first commercial LTE services were rolled out in 2010/11, carriers and mobile communications providers have steadily expanded their coverage areas by focussing on providing new high-speed mobile broadband services in the consumer markets.

“Power can be gained through appearances: people who exhibit behavioural signs of power are often treated in a way that allows them to actually achieve such power,” says a recent academic paper, investigating how leaders communicate. Cheryl Wakslak and Albert Han of the University of Southern California, and Pamela Smith of the University of California, San Diego, performed seven experiments on how the words we use allow us to appear powerful to others.

Wholesale Ethernet, also referred to as E-Access, is an integral part of the MEF’s CE 2.0 initiative. An E-Access service is one offered by a wholesale operator as a virtual connection between one or more end user locations and the retail service provider.

Over the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing scores of applications for Capacity’s Global Awards to be announced in November in Amsterdam. They were impressively written and without the marketing rhetoric of yesteryear.

As data traffic increases exponentially across the globe, operators are starting look at the effects such enormous consumption is having on our planet’s natural resources.

The net neutrality debate is once again rearing its head. As cloud, video and mobile continue to drive bandwidth demand, carriers are left in a difficult position on how to best manage network access.