ABI Research says that “mobile operators are steadily getting a handle on the mobile data traffic boom that is rippling through their networks,” with investment in the core network architecture “not just to speed up the throughput on their networks but also to make those networks more efficient and ‘aware’ of the traffic passing through them.” The company forecasts that US$12.5 billion will be spent on mobile gateways subscriber databases, IMS, session border controllers and software switch/media gateways in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 4.2 percent.