Vodafone's Vittorio Colao dreams up "unbeatable" alliance around LTE
By Darren Murph 
posted Jan 29th 2009 12:52PM
posted Jan 29th 2009 12:52PM
And here we go again -- new CEO, same message. Just under a year after ex-chief Arun Sarin urged the industry to rally around LTE, the new bigwig (that's Mr. Vittorio Colao to you) is coming forward with even zanier ideas. In a recent interview with Financial Times, Colao asserted that collaboration between China Mobile, Vodafone and Verizon Wireless around LTE could create an "unbeatable" alliance. More specifically, he noted that the trio could "work more closely... in the management of customers, procurement and service creation," which in some courtrooms may be misconstrued as collusion. All kidding aside (maybe), this master plan makes more sense when you realize that Vodafone owns a 3.2 percent stake in China Mobile and is already involved in VZW via a joint venture. Still, just because Microsoft and Apple could join forces to create an unbeatable operating system factory doesn't mean that laws would allow it.[Via mocoNews]
How would this be collusion? Verizon competes with AT&T, Sprint, etc, not Vodafone. Vodafone has their own competitors, as does China Mobile...
Not to mention that in the case of China Mobile they're throwing money away at a dead-end (TD-SCDMA, followed by TD-LTE which is totally incompatible with standard LTE, yay!). Should have invested in China Unicom instead, but NTT DoCoMo said that they're going to take a share of whichever provider gets UMTS, so they're way too late to the punch...
Wow, this article is completely retarded. Since when have companies that cannot physically compete with one another AND who have ownership stakes in one-another been banned from working together?
As has already been pointed out, Vodafone working with VZW, which it owns 45% of is not collusion, it is basically different divisions of the same company working together.
Engadget should expect better from its writers. Until the world government is formed, you can't have collusion between companies in different markets. And how is this idea zany? Vodafone working with alliance partners to keep procurement and service creation costs down will help the companies remain competitive - with benefit for the customer. It's exactly what Vodafone should be (actually, should have been) doing.