In December 2012 Telecoms.com Intelligence launched the first Annual Industry Survey, answered by almost 2,000 industry professionals, including 600 operator respondents.

Our intention was to discover what the industry as a whole thinks about a series of topics and we were naturally keen to see how operators in particular would respond to questions about the future of networks, cloud services, B/OSS, roaming, customer experience and revenue assurance.

Some of the numbers are truly surprising: who would have predicted that 35.7 per cent of respondents would believe that single network markets, in which operators compete at the service layer only, are commercially viable? Never mind that operators themselves buy into this model with greater enthusiasm (albeit only just—36.1 per cent) than the wider industry.