Many panellists were keen to stress that operational excellence can go further, whether in terms of traffic management schemes that produce energy savings or improvements in the core network that trigger cost savings in backhaul. Nevertheless, the industry will have to work hard to reconcile various opex reduction strategies — for example, the concept of self-organizing networks (SON) could be problematic in a shared network environment. ITU Telecom World 2009 — Ernst & Young‘s post-conference review 14