With the growing demand for mobile data, cellular service operators are increasingly turning to small cells -- picocells, microcells, metrocells and femtocells -- to deal with the capacity crunch in dense urban areas and to add coverage in areas with low or zero cellular signal levels, such as indoors and in remote rural locations.

Amid growing interest in small cells, widely seen as an inevitable tool for carriers to deal with booming mobile data demand, there are now signs that it may be hard to derive the expected benefits from them in some cases.

Using caching technology from Akamai Technologies, Ericsson's Smart Cloud Accelerator, announced Wednesday, is designed to allow operators to improve performance in both fixed and mobile networks.

Cisco, Juniper, HP and nine other technology companies have joined forces with two leading universities to form a research center focused on software-defined networking (SDN).

Ericsson has made an offer to acquire the Broadcast Services Division of Technicolor, as it looks to make further inroads into the broadcast market, the company said on Tuesday.

Security researchers have shown that carefully crafted text messages sent to cell phones via short message service (SMS) can cause them to shutdown without the knowledge of the owner.

A number of different technologies are being developed or improved to offer higher speeds for fixed and mobile broadband networks, as operators are preparing to compete with each other and carry video traffic in 3D and at higher resolutions, which is expected to happen in the coming year.