Mark Windle, head of marketing at OpenCloud, predicts that this year’s reduction in the number of traditional telecoms operators in some countries will provide an opportunity for other operators to innovate and capture market share in 2016.

He says next year will be a year of rapid change for telecoms… whether it’s MVNO disruption, competitive tariff pricing or simply defence from the ‘dark art’ of hacking.

Vodafone UK has confirmed that some of its customers were targeted by hackers last week.

However, it says its own systems were not compromised or breached in any way.

We're taking a look back at the biggest mobile industry news stories from February 2015, including allegations that the UK's security service tried to breach SIM card security by hacking into one of the world's biggest SIM producers.

We also talk about the planned BT and EE merger, the creation of two new UK virtual networks, some acquisitions in the mobile payment arena and a new Ubuntu smartphone.

Lenovo has admitted that it’s been shipping laptops and convertible laptop/tablet devices with a security vulnerability.

Between September and December last year, Windows-based laptops from Lenovo were loaded with software called Superfish. This ‘broke’ secure web pages, which meant that any fraudulent secure sites wouldn’t be detected.

SIM card manufacturer Gemalto has published the results of an investigation into an alleged hacking operation by the UK’s GCHQ and the USA’s National Security Agency.

A report earlier this month - based on information from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden - claimed that both security agencies had jointly hacked into Gemalto’s network to steal SIM encryption keys. This would have enabled them to decrypt mobile phone calls without needing the cooperation of mobile networks.