Vodafone moves to front of race for 3G services

By RICHARD BRADDELL utilities writer

The race for mobile supremacy continues unabated, with Vodafone planning an early introduction of third generation (3G) services.

"We are still trying to finalise some vendor negotiations right now," chief executive Grahame Maher said. "It will be sooner than many people think."

The move would put pressure on Telecom, which has said it would have to follow Vodafone into 3G, despite still commissioning a $200 million second generation CDMA network that is capable of near 3G services.

Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung said recently that she expected Vodafone to enter 3G because it was using New Zealand as a centre of excellence for its global operations.

Yesterday, Mr Maher agreed. "We will be definitely be going to 3G and we will continue to be a centre of excellence so we have to be early in the development," he said.

Telecom, with its third generation mobile partnership with Hutchison in Australia, has set up a mirror company in New Zealand that will become the platform for 3G at an as yet unspecified date.

But while Mr Maher's plans could be taken as signalling a new round in the technology race, he said yesterday that he regarded technology as subordinate to developing and marketing services that customers wanted.

"Our focus will be on what a customer wants and on developing solutions," he said.

While there was considerable focus on the merits of different technologies, Mr Maher said Vodafone was realising that mobile services would parallel those in the fixed-wire world. Technology's main difference would be to improve the quality or appearance of the services provided over mobile.

He said the comparison between the early DOS-based word processors and today's full colour Windows-based offerings provided a fair analogy.

Later this year, Telecom will join Vodafone in being among the first companies in the world to offer so-called 2.5G services that can be provided on enhancements to their respective 2G networks.

But because both companies will be leading the world, there is a shortage of applications and many of those will have to be developed locally.

Mr Maher said there would be no single "killer" application, but there would be a number that would be important to specific users. While once Vodafone might have sought to do everything in-house, that was no longer practical.

"One of the reasons is that there won't be one killer app, there will be thousands of applications," he said.

Vodafone has already set up a website - www.viper.net.nz - to provide an interface between itself and developers who can access tools to develop mobile applications.

Two hundred New Zealand developers - from the size of TelstraSaturn and Unisys down to backyard operators - are involved.

www.viper.net.nz