At the start of a crucial year for telecoms, which will see trends such as virtual reality and the IoT gathering pace and the first trials of next generation technologies such as 5G, Mobile Europe rounds up some of the industry’s big predictions for 2018.

A highly advanced 4G network and competition from market leader Proximus was behind Orange Belgium’s decision to go all-cellular for its IoT offering, according to its CTO.

BT is hoping the UK’s first public 5G testbed will help clarify the architecture of next generation networks and how consumers and businesses might use the technology.

Europe will continue to lag behind North East Asia and North America into the 5G era, holding only 16 percent of connections by 2023 and consuming an average of 28GB per month.

The difference between those developing 5G and the ones counting the cost of deployment has been throw into stark contrast with the CEO of BT Group claiming there are no business cases for the next generation technology.

Vodafone Group CTO Johan Wibergh has said the success of 5G is not yet guaranteed, calling for telcos to plan for the next generation's entire lifespan.

Fifty years ago, amid the year of the Summer of Love, the Six Day War, iconic albums from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground, Telenor Research launched its first project.

Dark clouds may be swirling around some of the industry's major vendors as explosive growth in China slows and 5G remains tantilisingly on the horizon, but Ericsson's new CTO is maintaining a Silicon Valley optimism about the years ahead.

Telefónica's virtualisation project UNICA has been given the risky business case of ensuring the operator's "survival", delegates at this year's Broadband World Forum have been told.

Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica used this week's Broadband World Forum to take aim at vendors, internet companies and even themselves for failing to change their innovation models.

Telefónica has debuted its mmWave spectrum to power a large-scale commercial Wi-Fi deployment in the City of London.

Deutsche Telekom's CTO plans to use recent trials as a way to force united thinking on 5G, even if he has to rely on model cars rather than an Olympic Games or a football World Cup.

A misconceived name and poor device support remain thorns in the side of LTE broadcast, according to the head of the technology’s industry group.

The "brutal" automation required to enable "bloody difficult" virtualisation and the ongoing challenge of getting the right skills in place were among the debates during the first day of SDN NFV World Congress.