Vodafone sinks the FTSE, thinks about WiFi
Vodafone have announced rather poor results, dragging the London FTSE down with it. Pre-tax profits fell from £4.54bn to £4.11bn in the half year to September and the company indicated 2007's free cashflow, mobile revenue growth and margins outside Japan would be lower than in 2006. That said, they raised their customer base to 171 million, and have 5 million 3G customers.
According to Gavin Patterson, an analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media, "By the end of June 2005 there was a total of 43 million 3G users worldwide, and we forecast a total of 70.6 million by the end of 2005." That's still not a great deal, though, and it costs the operators more to acquire a 3G customer than 3G revenue it gets back from that customer. Maybe that's why Vodafone have described themselves as 'agnostic' on the technology front, apparently comfortable " looking at new technologies that come along... tomorrow it could be Wi-Fi, it could be mobile WiMax."
Interesting - a mobile operator that doesn't use 'classic' mobile phone technologies. Not going to happen anytime soon, of course - the operators spent too much money on 3G to back out of it now. But it makes sense that they ahve a fall position in the face of soon-to-be-competing technologies such as WiFi and Wi-Max. My guess is, within 5 years we'll have predominately WiMax network operators in towns and cities, with classic mobile phone technologies reserved for less accessible places. We'll get the speeds we were always promised for 3G, but in an affordable package, and a thousand business case study books will be written on how the rush to 3G put back mobile broadband by 5 years.
