Cisco released a series of video recordings earlier this year, featuring a number of selected thought leaders from both within and outside the company. To save you time, we've reviewed and condensed the content into a shorter digestible article. Some of their comments aren't unique (so it's nice to hear they are aligned with others in the industry), while other viewpoints highlight a different perspective seen from other more traditional vendors.

Some of the major network operators are losing money and heavily in debt. How can they keep up with the demands of their customers, delivering more capacity, faster speeds and lower costs.

Where and how should they focus their investments?

...which includes pre-wiring buildings to be 3G capable using Small Cells.

Cisco has recently spent over $2 billion on acquisitions in the mobile network equipment market. They say they don't plan to become a macrocell vendor but do have a strategy to take a large chunk of the $50 billion annual CAPEX spend of today's dominant RAN vendors (Ericsson and Huawei).

We look at how they might do this and how the market dynamics might change.

It's that time of year again, when we (and many other analysts) reflect back at the year gone by and look ahead at what developments await us next year.

First, let's put ourselves in the spotlight and revisit our predictions from December 2011, see if we got them right, and how they might evolve next year.