Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, chairman and CEO of 2020 Venture Partners, has sent one of his Top Ten lists. This time, for your edification, the Top Ten Service Provider Pain Points:

1) Flat ARPU
Where is the capex to support 50-percent traffic growth year over year for quad-play services?

2) Network Congestion
How do you plan for capacity when mobility induces temporary congestion without any warning?

3) All-You-Can-Eat Connectivity Services
Good for content providers, but bad for service providers.

4) Peer-to-Peer Traffic
It's growing fast, but there is no business model in sight to monetize it.

5) Over-the-Top Video
Service providers feel their networks are being robbed for this kind of VoD delivery.

6) Network Security
We're seeing attacks, attacks and more attacks. Lots of time, cost and resources exhausted fending off network attacks.

7) IPv6
This is a massive "must do" with no incremental revenue attached.

8) Regulations
Net neutrality is probably hampering a packet monetization solution that could make service provider traffic more profitable.

9) The Inability to Monetize Packet Traffic
Service providers are living with low-margin "dumb"-pipe revenues while Google and others are gaining high-margin traffic via over-the-top applications. This isn't sustainable for service providers, especially on wireless networks where spectrum is constrained.

10) Customer Churn
When customers aren't happy, they churn. When they churn, service providers lose money.

Now a question: What do you think service provders should do in 2011 to eliminate some of these pain points?

For more on Dr. Eslambolchi and his various corporate roles, see:

• Eslambolchi Advises Subex
• Verecloud Expands Board
• IBM Makes Intelliden Buy
• Eslambolchi Joins Packet Design
• Eslambolchi Hatches Content Search Startup
• Eslambolchi Tries On New Hats
• Eslambolchi: WiMax Boom Coming
• Eslambolchi's Top Ten

— The Staff, Light Reading