New competitors are leveraging a handful of key of trends — enabled by ongoing and inevitable technology advances — to change the mobile service provider space in critical ways. Among the tech trends to watch:

• The ability of companies to leverage software to drive intelligence to the edge rather than the core of the network. What kind of software are we talking about? More capable native operating systems, such as Android; more Web-driven development environments, such as the iPhone SDK; location/presence-aware, advertising-monetized search engines; and mobile browsers that bring the desktop Web to the device.

• The ability of open-source technology and open development methodologies to speed creation and distribution of smarter edge-based apps, as opposed to the walled-garden approaches that rule software distribution on mobile devices today.

• Improvements in silicon-level technologies, which improve device processing power and reduce power consumption while making some of the capabilities described above — such as embedded VoIP stacks, GPS capabilities or speech processing — universally available down at the integrated chip- and board-level.

• The power, flexibility and availability of all-IP network back-ends, which greatly reduce the costs of completing and capability of enhancing voice and data calls that start on wireless networks.

• Growth of radio access technologies — from Wi-Fi to WiMAX to 4G — that providers can use to bring customers into next-generation, mobile service environments.