Infonetics (News - Alert) Research has released excerpts from a new report entitled "December 2012 Fundamental Telecom and Datacom Market Drivers," which analyzes global and regional trends and conditions in the market. This report is published twice annually, acts as an assessment for the state of the telecoms industry at the moment, also includes predictions for the future.

“As we’re ending 2012, Europe’s crisis remains uncontained and is now spreading to Germany," said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research (News - Alert).

"The potential of shaking business confidence everywhere in the world has risen to new heights, and the IMF lowered its growth forecast and is warning of recession risks due to downward revision of global GDP, which now stands at 3.3%. Economic readings are worrisome everywhere but the U.S., but so far the impact on global telecom and enterprise remains tame, and we’re forecasting capex to grow nearly 4% in 2012 over 2011.”

Téral went on to add that the announcement of multibillion dollar investment plans by AT&T (News - Alert) and Deutsche Telekom should make 2013 a "brighter" year.

Meanwhile, global mobile service revenue acted as the main growth engine in the overall telecom/datacom market as it was up 4.3 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2012, while user mobility — namely in the form of BYOD anywhere — has begun putting pressure on carriers to move to a single network for fixed and mobile access.

The report also states that software-defined networks (SDNs) will indeed play a major role in the near future, but that the challenge of finding implementations of hybrid SDN and non-SDN in live networks is a major hurdle.

Earlier in December, Infonetics Research released two reports — Femtocell (News - Alert) Equipment - 3Q12 market share and forecast report, and Outdoor Small Cell Mobile Backhaul Equipment Market Outlook — both of which contain positive news, this according to TMCnet senior editor Peter Bernstein.