A research team at Telenor identified six trends that the global mobile industry needs to be aware of in 2016.

“The trends we have highlighted are not radically new, but we believe that 2016 is the year the adoption or the application of these will start to be felt,” said  Bjorn Taale Sandberg, head of Telenor Research.

Firstly, operators must be willing to let customers co-create services. Since customer bases are becoming more sophisticated (and demanding), operators must deliver superior user experiences that are more closely aligned with changing behaviour.

Secondly, Telenor predicts that the “Big Data” collected by operators will be leveraged more for the wider, social good in 2016.

The third trend forecast by the operator is so-called softwarisation – networks as software rather than hardware. Talked about technologies such as NFV and SDN will take off in 2016, the Nordic operator said.

And digital content will become better understood next year too. “As they get more deeply integrated into digital services and devices, machines will understand more digital content,” said the research. This trend will be experienced through new services, such as better digital assistants, search results and more relevant advertising

It is no surprise that IoT features in the list, but Telenor is particularly interested in low cost/low power consuming networks. It predicts Low Power Wide Area Networks as a trend for 2016.

Finally, the operator terms the phrase “levelling out the playing field”, meaning a tendency among governments and regulators to engage with the debate on how to change existing legal frameworks for new digital services and the so-called sharing economy.