3GSM: Vodafone tells mobile industry to stop talking and start implementing

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In the same 3GSM World Congress keynote where Rob Conway, the chief executive of the GSM Association, introduced two new projects for making payments with a mobile phone, Vodafone's chief executive Arun Sarin called on the mobile industry to stop talking and roll out services now.

"We've been talking about money transfers for some time now - it's time to stop talking," he said.

"This is equally true in mobile TV, in IP communications, on payments. Advertising, gaming, mobile TV - we need to move and occupy this space before someone else occupies this space. We have to be faster on execution. As an industry it takes us a long time to get things done; we need to move faster otherwise others will eat our lunch."

Sarin highlighted the long discussions over Long Term Evolution - the future standards for 3G and beyond - compared to faster development of WiMAX. He predicted WiMAX would be "ready for prime time" in a couple of years and warned that even though LTE will be more attractive because it offers backwards compatibility with 2G and 3G, the industry could be left arguing over standards while WiMAX services roll out and make them irrelevant.

The time has also come for mobile operators to push ahead with fixed mobile convergence, according to Sarin, who said: "The opportunity to compete with fixed is here. We need to make our moves and pull more and more minutes away from fixed line."

Both Vodafone and the GSM Association are backing standards for mobile advertising covering the format for ads, the size of banner ads, the length of video ads, the platforms for delivering ads and how to measure the number of viewers.

According to GSM Association surveys, users will accept "reasonable" advertising on mobiles and Sarin pointed out what an attractive market mobile advertising ought to be, with two billion mobile phone users compared to 1.4 billion TV sets and one billion PCs.

"A phone has the power to reach anybody and we always leave our phones on. It can be targeted and optimised for each individual user; this sounds like the ideal advertising medium," added Sarin.

Again, he emphasised that mobile players need to move quickly. "If we don't build our broadband networks we will have this opportunity taken away from us," he said. "We need to seize the moment here."

When asked about the iPhone, Sarin said he expected to see it in Europe by the end of 2007 and said it was a very attractive phone for a certain segment of the market. But he also claimed that there are too many mobile operating systems in Europe for operators and developers to support, saying: "We need to reduce the total number of operating systems on phones so we can have easier content delivery."

The GSM Association announced some projects in the areas Sarin focused on. The Personal Instant Messaging initiative announced at last year's 3GSM is has created interoperable IM services ready to launch first in Italy and Spain, followed by France, Germany and the UK later this year.

At least one of the mobile payment projects Rob Conway introduced is likely to launch soon, with the first roll out in Korea. Over the air payments will use your existing credit card, with the details encrypted and stored in the SIM, either stored in advance or downloaded each time. Conway claimed the card information is secure because it's the same system as the smartcards banks already use.

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