These are exciting times in wireless. At this year's 3G Americas analyst event, which launched today, there appears to be consensus among operators and vendors alike that the growth in mobile data use over the past year has outpaced expectations, impacting networks in a big way. While this growth may not have been a complete surprise to operators, the impact on traffic has been on a larger scale than they would have imagined even a year ago - and this is true both in the US and Latin America. Due in part to this growth, the pace of interest in LTE - and not just interest but actual RFPs - has also gained more momentum recently than anticipated.  These two trends - rapid growth in consumer/enterprise data use and faster movement in operator plans for LTE - indicate we should have an exciting year ahead of us despite the still weak economy. I was particularly glad to hear that LTE is moving very quickly behind the scenes, and operators are pushing vendors to move even faster. Opportunities for better speeds with HSPA+ are not slowing down LTE at all, and operators are closely following developments, and may move more quickly to LTE rather than implement higher speeds on HSPA+ if the situation warrants. Of course, as always, spectrum will be the more critical delaying factor in some markets. Some of the related themes emerging in my conversations with operators and vendors focus on use of network intelligence to better manage traffic, efforts to upgrade backhaul to avoid bottlenecks, the real-world learning that is beginning to take place with LTE equipment, implementing solutions to gain visibility into users to leverage knowledge of presence/preferences/billing/services, and merging the worlds of IP and radio access networks. Tomorrow the operators and vendors at the event will discuss their latest views on LTE, HSPA, backhaul and mobile broadband devices in a series of panels and roundtable discussions, so more to follow...