Adieu, Arun Sarin

Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin is retiring. After five years as head of the world’s most far-flung operator, the man believes his job is done. He may be right. He’s taken Vodafone from a stagnant operator watching its core markets languish in maturity to one with considerable growth prospects in some of the world’s hottest markets. He dumped Vodafone’s minority interests in operators around the world in favor of taking majority stakes in carriers Vodafone could directly control.

The exception, of course, is Verizon Wireless. Since Bell Atlantic, GTE and Sarin’s former company Vodafone AirTouch merged the operations to form Verizon Wireless, the company has stood as an odd duck in the Vodafone flock. A CDMA operator, Vodafone controlled a bare minority stake, Verizon went its own way, keeping its own name its own technology and refusing to integrate with the global Vodafone behemoth. Not that it’s hurt Verizon Wireless at all. It’s become a juggernaut in its own right, claiming the largest number of retail customers, and it did so without the benefit of the monster acquisitions of its competitors.

Still, if there was any property in the Vodafone portfolio that warranted the term “Vodafone investment” rather than “Vodafone company,” it was Verizon Wireless. Throughout his tenure, Sarin was constantly fending off rumors that Vodafone would divest its minority stake and attack the U.S. market directly. Vodafone did bid unsuccessfully on AT&T Wireless, but otherwise that speculation amounted to nothing. Sarin, however, had other ideas in mind. Shortly before announcing his retirement, Sarin finally found a way of tying the estranged Verizon Wireless to the Vodafone family: LTE.

Verizon and Vodafone announced they would conduct joint LTE trials with the aim of launching a global network under the same technology banner. Of course, to say Verizon’s LTE decision was entirely Sarin’s doing would be gross overstatement. Verizon had plenty of its own economic and strategic reasons for adopting the global standard, but the joint announcement wasn’t just window dressing applied after both companies arrived at the their technology choices separately. Verizon revealed the two had been working together for some time to find a mutually satisfactory future network, even going so far as to jointly test WiMAX.

Sarin didn’t stop there. He doesn’t want Verizon to hold hands with just Vodafone Group companies. He wants Verizon to hold hands with everyone. Sarin has been leading the charge to merge the various 4G options into a single standard. Specifically, he’s appealed to the industry on numerous occasions to fold WiMAX into the global LTE standard, creating the first unified generation of wireless networks. Sprint and Clearwire have other ideas, though, so maybe Sarin’s best bet on inter-carrier harmony is with Verizon and the companies he runs.

It will take years before LTE rolls out and Verizon’s network fits into the global Vodafone framework, but it will eventually happen. Sarin can then look back in his retirement—or from the helm of whatever company he may be running—and know he had a lot to do with making it happen.

Contact me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.