Report: All anyone wants for 2010 is bandwidth; and companies are prepping for the demand

Sluggish economy be damned: Unprecedented appetites for bandwidth are pushing infrastructure service providers to invest in their networks. But providers are profiting from those investments and will continue to do so if one venture capital firm’s predictions for 2010 come true: that the demand for faster connections, from businesses and from service providers, will continue to soar.

That’s the forecast from M/C Venture Partners in its recent report on the top 10 communications technology trends for next year. M/C predicts that operators will be forced to offer more powerful bandwidth thanks to wireless broadband on smartphones (the “iPhone effect”), ever-higher Internet transmission speeds and fiber-based data services...