There's Always an Elephant in the Room

That's not a problem if it is your elephant. Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin warns his mobile compatriots that “as an industry it takes us a long time to get things done; we need to move faster otherwise others will eat our lunch." Forgetting for the moment about Microsoft, Google or the likes of Skype, what about WiMAX, which sometimes is seen as a comeptitive business platform, and sometimes just a platform?

"WiMAX is now a serious contender for mobile broadband," he thinks, positioning WiMAX as a platform any mobile provider can adopt, as Sprint Nextel already has done. Others might see WiMAX as a competing business platform that will be used by attackers to assault the legacy mobile providers, whatever technology they may use for fourth generation networks.

Nobody seems to disagree about the need, though. “If we don’t build our broadband networks we will have this opportunity taken away from us,” Sarin says. For some time Vodafone has distanced itself from the "3G or WiMAX" debate, in part because it seems to be thinking it will have to adopt WiMAX as its fourth generation network standard.

Vodafone subsidiary SFR in France may already have begun WiMAX testing. Vodafone network partner MTC-Vodafone recently won a license for WiMAX spectrum in Bahrain. The company also is expected to bid on WiMAX licenses to be auctioned in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the coming months.

Vodafone acquired a WiMAX license in Greece last year, and is deploying a network in Malta. The company also has been testing WiMAX in New Zealand, and in South Africa.

Sarin notes that less than 10 percent of Vodafone revenues are derived from 3G services. The implication, it seems to us, is that 3G has proven to be not much more than a "wideband" niche between narrowband and broadband. Sort of like the analogy of narrowband voice (64 kbps); basic rate ISDN (up to 128 kbps) and "true" broadband in the megabit per second range.

So if legacy mobile carriers adopt WiMAX, how much sense does it make to track WiMAX deployment separately from wireless provider 4G? Really, the issue is not WiMAX. The issue is whether WiMAX can provide the platform for a competitive challenge to dominant wireless providers, because the early notion had been that WiMAX would open up another access alternative. But it won't if the dominant service providers simply offer it themselves.

There's an elephant in the room. The question is, whose elephant is it?