breaking news Australia's third-ranked telecommunications company, Vodafone Australia, announced today the company would go it alone in planning for the initial deployment of a third-generation mobile network.

Grahame Maher, Vodafone Australia's managing director, said in a statement that negotiations with other mobile operators over a proposed partnering agreement to deliver third-generation services had been unsuccessful.

Maher told ZDNet Australia   in an interview this afternoon "we were unable to get other people's timeframes to match ours.

"We're much more bullish about the future of [third-generation] mobile services in Australia than our prospective partners".

However, Maher added that he "still expected other partners to come on board over the coming year". A partnership would entail the investment of capital in third-generation network deployment, he stressed.

Vodafone Australia, which has 2.59 million customers, already operates a 2.5 generation network. The company is globally comitted to the launch of third-generation services, which can deliver bandwidth-hungry applications such as full-motion, real-time video, video conferencing and high-speed Internet access.

Maher said he still believed that the deployment of four national third-generation networks -- built by Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison -- would be "crazy".

Vodafone is undertaking a global third-generation mobile deployment which would see a range of services and network capabilities available by early 2005. This move is applying pressure on the Australian Vodafone operation to meet a similar target date for deployment of its network. Maher said other prospective partners, Telstra and SingTel Optus, "did not have the same sort of pressure" on them to launch their third-generation mobile services. Those two heavyweight carriers probably would launch third-generation services by the end of 2005 or 2006, he said.

He added that a partnership with Hutchison was not really an option as that company was building its own third-generation network from scratch. "The economics don't make sense," he said. Hutchison, which is already operating third-generation services here, plans to invest around AU$3 billion in a business expected to become cash-flow positive by the end of 2006.

The next step in the Vodafone deployment -- which also encompasses New Zealand -- is vendor selection, with a decision likely by January 2004, Maher said. Four vendors are presently in the running, with no decision yet made as to whether the company will award the deal to one or a few suppliers.

The funding of that first stage -- the scope of which is yet to be determined -- is likely to be around the AU$300 million mark, Maher said.

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