When Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said on November 20, 2013, his company was considering keeping its annual capex above traditional levels to fund the rollout of next-generation fiber and 4G networks, Vodafone lost about $3.7 billion in market capitalization on that day. While higher-speed networks delight customers, they do not go down well with shareholders obsessed with cash flow and dividend yield.

Fortunately, Hadoop can stretch necessary network investments by a modest yet meaningful amount. If a large Hadoop project costing $1 million dollars could delay or reduce by just a few percent annual network capex spend, which for the large operators tops $1 billion per year, what’s not to like?

Let’s look at four examples where leading carriers are deploying Hadoop today to optimize their network investments.

Network capacity planning benefits from better and more timely operational intelligence. The consumption of services and resulting bandwidth in a particular neighborhood…