Vodafone chief: Verizon needs LTE before we do
BusinessWeek recently engaged Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin in an interesting, lively, and positively revealing interview about his company's 4G prospects, Android, and its marriage to Verizon, among other juicy morsels. The whole transcript is a good read, but we were particularly interested about his comments about LTE, the GSMA-adopted roadmap to 4G for GSM carriers. Despite the presumption that Vodafone would be moving to LTE alongside virtually everyone else, Sarin is careful to note that the company has not committed to it yet; they're still concerned about some intellectual property and technical issues, so they're steering clear of signing their names on the dotted line for the time being. He also says that partner Verizon is in more desperate, immediate need of LTE than it is, because EV-DO can't scale up to near-4G speeds to bridge the G gap the same way HSPA can. Either way, though, he says that Voda will be rolling out LTE in the 2011-2012 time frame, and that "for nobody is it an experience before 2010" -- so what difference does a year make, really?
[Via mocoNews]
