Vodafone cosies up to Crazy John’s and chooses Ericsson for HSPA

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 10 March 2008 19:38

IT Industry - Market

Hewitt continued that: "Vodafone markets the best products available and we'll continue to enhance our mobile broadband network capabilities as new technology becomes available”, likely alluding to the fact that Telstra has promised a 21Mbps network by the end of 2008, outclassing Vodafone and Optus’ networks, with a 42Mbps network speed promised for the end of 2009 - although we will simply have to see what Vodafone does to compete with Telstra's faster network.

Of course, devices capable of sending and receiving data at those tremendous speeds has yet to leave the labs and make it into consumer devices – we don’t even have 14.4Mbps consumer devices as yet.

21Mbps and 42Mbps devices will also likely chew up a lot of battery power, although for plug-in devices this is less relevant. Still, battery technology will likely improve over the next couple of years, too, so it will certainly be an interesting time to watch mobile broadband developments – while WiMAX technologies come to market as well, built-into notebooks and offered by companies such as Unwired.
 
In comments on the Vodafone and Ericsson partnership, Bill Zikou, CEO of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, said: "Ericsson is very pleased that Vodafone has chosen to install the highest specification mobile broadband technology commercially available today. Ericsson has many of Australia's best network engineers already working on our rollout schedule and technology solution and our teams in all states and territories are keen to get started on this incredibly exciting project."
 
Zikou left out “profitable” – but we certainly have no qualms with that, they have to be paid, and they’re helping Vodafone build a network that will hopefully see Telstra bring its prices down. Time will tell how fast, or otherwise, that happens.