Comments on: Vodafone's $7 billion bet

By: john smith

john smith — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:06:58 +0000

Just a note. His name is Arun Sarin, no Arin Sarun. Goes a long way to being credible if you get the names right.

Thanks,

By: Vijay Anand

Vijay Anand — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 23:31:18 +0000

I would say that mobile operators can bet on two things in the near future: wireless data networks (using GPRS & EDGE), and access to their directory of all the users they have.

Eventually voice will start flowing as VoIP over GPRS connections, so having a flat fee wouldn't help at all.

The sooner they embrace this fact, there are plenty of interesting business models to look at. But the cold fact is that, no matter how you look at it, the operators wont make a dime without collaborating with the other players, especially the ones who are building the applications and services – but thats the way it is happening right now anyways..

By: Paul Jardine

Paul Jardine — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 06:50:24 +0000

Of course, if Vodafone's revenues were to half over the course of the next few years, then 10% would be a much smaller figure! perhaps Arin Sarun isn't telling the whole story!

By: Sajith

Sajith — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 13:03:34 +0000

Hi Alec, Voice will not be a source of this increased revenues since voice ARPUs will only go down as the trend is towards flat rate voice pricing. However other sources of revenues might emerge. Tomi Ahonen's blog (http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2006/11/cyworld_insight.html) has a fascinating look at Cyworld and some of the ideas there might be implemented at Vodafone. He has also come up with a $3.5bn figure for revenues from Social networking today here – http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2006….