New mobile technologies are evolving at an accelerating pace, putting pressure on MNOs and MVNOs to find innovative ways to cost-effectively offer new services to their customers. In some ways, it is a paradigm shift for mobile operators. At one time, MNOs could base their business plans on offering a limited set of services that included voice and eventually text messaging. In that era, the principal competitive imperative was to build the largest network, with the largest geographical coverage, and with the best Quality of Service (QoS).

Steve Barefoot, senior product analyst at Interop Technologies, on NFV and its numerous benefits to MNOs.

As the profit and differentiation available from mobile services such as voice, messaging, and data decreases, operators need to look to what mobile analyst Chetan Sharma has termed the fourth wave^[1.] in order to open up additional lines of business and create additional revenue streams. 

The cloud has fundamentally changed the way organizations, including Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), provide and consume computing resources. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is one of the principle technologies underlying cloud-computing platforms and is often discussed in terms of its technology and features, such as resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and on-demand self-service. 

Infrastructure sharing is not without its technical and competitive challenges but the benefits and potential cost savings are well-documented. Less well-documented is the possibility that new communication technologies will make exclusive ownership of the physical infrastructure even less attractive in the future.