Bye, Bye! — The McLaughlin Group
RCR Wireless says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin led off the keynote at the 3GSM World Congress announcing his company was the high bidder for 67 percent of coveted Indian operator Hutchison (pdf). The deal, valued at more than $11 billion for India’s No. 4 operator, bolsters Vodafone’s customer base by more than 22 million subscribers.
Vodafone, a British mobile network operator, is the largest mobile telecommunications network company in the world with a market cap of about £86 billion (November 2006). Vodafone also has a 45-percent stake in Verizon Wireless.
The 3GSM speakers offered their views on the industry’s hot topics, reports RCR News.
Sarin expressed concern over the slow pace of technology evolution in the GSM family, comparing the current state of the Long Term Evolution path for UMTS with WiMAX. Sarin noted that while LTE is still in the development phase, backers of the WiMAX standard have already managed final approval of the technology. Despite the apparent praise for WiMAX, Sarin noted during the question-and-answer portion of the keynote that he thought WiMAX was “still not ready for primetime,” and that he did not think it would be for a couple of years.
Sarin also took a dig at Sprint Nextel Corp., which last year announced plans to launch a WiMAX network beginning later this year.
‘Sprint Nextel has a CDMA2000 1x and iDEN network, so it appears they like to have several networks running in parallel. I don’t understand the logic, maybe someone could explain it to me.”
Of course, no meeting of the industry’s elite could end without comments on Apple Inc.’s recently announced iPhone device. While the device is not expected to make it across the pond until at least the end of the year, all on stage were impressed with the simplicity of Steve Job’s wireless baby.
“iPhone is a good step,” said Ahuja, who previously noted that the industry needed to work on reducing complexity of wireless devices. “Steve has done a good job, he has raised the bar and the others will react.”
India has one of the fastest growing telecom networks in the world. India’s public sector telecom company BSNL is the 7th largest telecom company in world. Reliance, Bharti Telecom, Tata Indicom, Hutch, MTNL, and BPL are other major operators in India.
Approximately 150 million use mobile phones, but only 50 million use land lines. Airtel controls 21.4% of the mobile subscriber base followed by Reliance with 20.3%, BSNL with 18.6%, and Hutch with 14.7% subscriber base, per June 2005 data (via Wikipedia).
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