Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin told BusinessWeek that Vodafone affiliate Verizon Wireless would probably need to upgrade to LTE before Vodafone because the European carrier is "riding the 3.5G wave."

"We are headed [toward LTE]. But we want to get a lot of the technical and standards and intellectual-property rights issues resolved before we say we are ready to sign up for it. Frankly, in this particular instance we have a great advantage. We have deployed something called HSDPA [High-Speed Downlink Packet Access] which is 3.5G. So if you said there is no technology available to you before 2012, we at Vodafone are completely relaxed because we are riding the 3.5-generation wave," Sarin said. "In fact our affiliate here in the U.S., Verizon Wireless, will need the fourth-generation wave faster than we do."

For more on Sarin's LTE throttling:
- read the whole interview over at BusinessWeek