Déjàvu: Arun Sarin brings MWC speech to CTIA
Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin kicked off the second day of the CTIA Wireless show here in Las Vegas by explaining to the audience that Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson's keynote yesterday was partially an April Fool's joke.
"Richard Branson regaled you with ideas about Mars yesterday… but I have to remind you: Today is April 2nd and we're going to get down to business right away," Sarin said to applause and laughter.
The timeliness of Sarin's speech, however, ended right there. While his lead-off keynote speech wasn't a carbon copy of the one he gave at Mobile World Congress two months ago, the vast majority of the speech was. Here were the key redundancies:
- WiMAX should become part of the LTE standard.
- We need fewer mobile operating systems.
- Carriers must not allow themselves to become bit pipes.
- The time is now to invest in our networks in order to reap the upside of the mobile Internet, or someone else will see that upside instead.
Check out our coverage of Sarin's speech at Mobile World Congress to relive the magic a third time.
Sarin did give a few updated statistics about the Vodafone Group:
- There are 25 million 3G customers in its footprint
- 1.5 million Vodafone subscribers are on the mobile Internet
- Vodafone subs have streamed 2.5M YouTube videos
- Vodafone subs have completed 92 million searches through its mobile Google search offering
- Four million Vodafone users have subscribed to the carrier's Vodafone at Home service, which allows users to pay landline rates when close to home.
- Nearly 3 million Vodafone users subscribe to the enterprise version of that service, which allows them to pay landline service prices when near work.
While Sarin lauded the stats, he said that the numbers are less impressive than the fact that users are demanding these services. -Brian
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Comments
Posted by strat | April 3, 2008 - 12:38pm
This conceit about operators/carriers "owning the app" and "not becoming bitpipes" is the genesis of the sad slowly developing state of the art with mobile data services.
Those of us who have been a part of building out the early Internet remember the attempts by carriers in the X.25 world to nickel-and-dime their customers.
I appreciate the desire to recover CapEx for network buildouts, as well as issues of "network harms", but let's face it... central planning didn't work for the Soviet Union, either.
It's the peak of hubris to believe that any operator can possibly understand the businesses of, develop for, and deliver applications for all users, or even just most large enterprise users.
There is no shame in providing a friendly mobile data offering, and open handsets, with an easy developer support path. One just might be surprised at the results. Oh and "open" doesn't necessarily have to mean free-as-in-beer for everything, but it certainly doesn't mean 18 month app qualification regimes and paying thousands of dollars for signing certificates.
Somewhere, there is someone in a garage, with frustration, necessity or hunger driving their desire to build some wonderful application for use on someone's mobile network on someone's handset, and people who don't want to wait a year and a half to use it. Whomever gets it about fostering those efforts may well just find themselves with improving ARPU, a ton of goodwill, a blooming developer community and a bump to the stock price.
Of course, it would require some setting aside of ego in favor of customer welfare. It's not a hard story to tell, the market analysts get it, or they wouldn't pay so much attention to Android.
Plus ça change, plus ç'est la meme ... chose.
