The end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 brought some interesting announcements in the telecom world.   It began in mid December with TeliaSonera announcing the deployment of LTE in 25 cities.  This was followed at the very end of the year with an announcement by Orange UK to roll out HD voice across its network and then at beginning of 2010 with AT&T issuing a challenge to the FCC to stand up to its mandate to provide broadband to the masses by letting them off the hook to provide basic telephony services. 

All this points to some bold positioning among telephony companies towards cutting edge technology.   This makes for exciting times because the upheaval caused by a rapid migration towards new networks always brings new opportunities.  

So, in the spirit of the new year, let's make some predictions:

1. This will finally be the year of the SIP trunking gateway. The demand has been growing steady and we should finally see a break-through in enterprise investment in this area. When you couple this network segment with the possibility of providing end to end services to the mobile business customer, we should see a number of carriers making advancements in this area.
2. HD voice will continue to roll out, initially in Europe, then into APAC and perhaps to some degree in the Americas. However, by the end of the year, it will no longer be news worthy as much as something that people just expect to happen.
3. Mobile broadband and more importantly mobile video markets will continue to struggle as carriers work feverishly to roll out networks capable of maintaining pace with the insatiable need of consumers to be constantly connected to the internet. However, mobile TV will gain ground both in terms of individual services and the ability of LTE to provide broadcasts.
4. Most of North America will have LTE and HSPA+ coverage by the end of the year, but that still won't be enough for consumers and the major carriers will have to resort to creative billing practices (prepaid, scaling service levels, etc.) and 'forced' advertising in order to keep up with the costs of rolling out a network with sufficient capacity.
5. The usage of the mobile phone will begin to undergo a transformation this year, far more so than it has with the iPhone already. The transformation will be somewhat akin to the social networking revolution because the platforms will be exposed to millions of would-be programmers, each with an idea of how they would like to use their phone. We see this everyday in GUIs for on-line gaming and personal web pages. There will soon be an explosion of various widgets and personal assistance tools for the mobile handset that will start to change the way we use them in everyday tasks of our life.

So there you have it.   We will have to wait until next year to see if I'm right.