The company underlined its support for mobile WiMAX by also...

The company underlined its support for mobile WiMAX by also announcing that its application to join the WiMAX Forum has been approved. The operator is also partnering with Sprint Nextel in order to monitor the progress of the U.S. provider's mobile WiMAX rollout.

"We see two future candidates that will meet the future requirements for 50 Mbps and more," said Alan Harper, global strategy director of the Vodafone Group. "Both share common factors such as OFDM and MIMO."

Harper was unwilling to give too many details about where and when the two technologies would actually be deployed, but said Vodafone would be working with both the 3GPP and IEEE on the further development of LTE and mobile WiMAX (based on 802.16e) respectively.