MCI INTERVIEW
MCI INTERVIEW
It is a strategy that Vodafone is
embracing wholeheartedly, although
not every element of the operation can
be released. “You have to look at your
sustainable differentiation and what
underpins your brand and customer
offer,” says Pusey. “In this respect
I don’t see us outsourcing the core
network to anybody in a hurry—or our
ability to create and deliver services
across it.
“Where the radio estate is concerned,
you have to take it country by
country. In a mature market, where
countries are saturated with base
stations you might look for cost improvements
from outsourcing. In a
market like India where you have a
massive build to carry out, you want
to do it economically.”
Pusey argues that outsourcing enhances
the engineering control that he
has over the networks. It also frees up
“more capex to spend on the customers,”
he says. “Look at how we offer
differentiation for the customer. It’s
not in the concrete and the steel, but it
is in the radio and the backhaul. So any
model that allows us to dramatically
reduce concrete and steel by sharing
sites or leases and rentals but allows
us the flexibility to add competitive
advantage with the radio and backhaul
is a good thing,” he adds.
As to whether a cost management
exercise like Indus Towers could ever
become a profit centre, Pusey is unsure.
That, he says, is “one for the
commercial guys.”
India, emerging markets, 7.2Mbps
over HSDPA in mature territories, outsourcing,
these developments will all
feature in both Pusey and Vodafone’s
immediate future. Further ahead,
Pusey talks of the point on the evolutionary
roadmap where peak speeds
of 28.8Mbps are obtainable. This, he
says, will provide sufficient quality of
performance for his customer base for
several years.
Beyond that Vodafone is publicly
neutral on technologies, is a member
of the WiMAX Forum and the NGMN
(Next Generation Mobile Networks)
group and is clearly keeping its options
open. Pusey’s boss, Arun Sarin,
warned the LTE community at 3GSM
World Congress 2007 that it was
threatened by the faster development
of Mobile WiMAX.
India, emerging markets, 7.2Mbps over HSDPA in mature territories, outsourcing,
these developments will all feature in both Pusey and Vodafone’s immediate future
And yet the firm’s only ‘4G’ commitment
so far has been to LTE. Late
in 2007, Vodafone announced that it
would collaborate with US carrier
Verizon Wireless, in which it holds
a 45 per cent stake, on the development
of an LTE strategy for the
US market. Verizon is a CDMA2000
operator and has long been viewed
from without as the technology misfit
in the Vodafone portfolio. Now that
it is moving to LTE, however, can we
expect a closer relationship between
the two firms?
“I couldn’t comment on that commercially,”
says Pusey “But from a
technology point of view it’s a strong
voice in the industry when Vodafone
and Verizon are collaborating on something
because of the pure scale. That’s
not to the exclusion of everyone else
because we work very closely together
in NGMN. But it gives a boost to the
vendors because they realise we’re serious
and it gives them the confidence
to put their R&D dollars in the right
place,” he says.
Managing the supply chain is the
third broad element of the Vodafone
CTO’s job. Recent waves of consolidation
among the vendor community
have had little impact on the products
that Pusey buys from his pool of five
radio suppliers.
He sees it as part of his responsibility
to keep the vendors competitive
with one another: “It’s not good to have
36 Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
one vendor miles ahead of the others
if the others are somewhere else in
your footprint,” he says.
“You can sometimes see up to a
year’s difference between the lead
vendor and the back of the pack. We
try and manage that deliberately;
we don’t ever share who the vendor
is that we’re talking about but we
continually remind all the vendors
of advances in technology and where
they sit in terms of the leading edge.
It’s in our interests to encourage
everyone to keep a certain pace of
technological advancement.”
In part Vodafone manages that
through its own research and development
programme, an activity that
Pusey is keen to reference. “We get
reported a lot for the costs of technologies
but we’re accelerating innovation
as well,” he says. “That’s a very big
agenda item for us.”
In conversation Pusey plays down
the size of the task in front of him.
“Other people have much bigger jobs,”
he says. But the breadth of technologies
that are in operation, evaluation
or preparation for rollout—and the
scale and geographical spread on
which those technologies will be implemented—is
unmatched in the industry.
Humility aside, there’s no escaping that
kind of magnitude and there’s probably
a sliver of honesty in Pusey’s joke that
top of his list of objectives for 2008 is
to keep his job. �
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