Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin on Wednesday called for the industry to rally around a single standard for 4G and warning that a new technology war would wreck havoc on an industry struggling to make sense of mobile broadband. He’s right in one sense, the duel between WiMAX and Long Term Evolution will create uncertainty and fragmentation, but Sarin doesn’t have much right to call.

Sarin helped perpetuate the original technology wars in the first place. As CEO of Airtouch Communications he was right in the middle of the fray, leading his company down the CDMA path while much of the rest of the world was demanding a similar conformity in the 2G digital world. Airtouch was eventually acquired by his current company Vodafone and its operations merged into Verizon Wireless. Verizon ain’t doing half bad in the aftermath of the technology wars.

CDMA was a superior technology to the Time Division Multiplexing Access (remember TDMA?) going up at the time. Airtouch, like Sprint and Bell Atlantic Mobile and a dozen other providers, wanted the additional capacity the networks provided, and its future owners took advantage of the competitive timing of CDMA 1X networks to launch 2.5G and 3G services ahead of their GSM counterparts.

Is it fair to ask Sprint, which is getting pounded by Verizon Wireless and AT&T in the market, to give up its time-to-market edge by giving up WiMAX and adopting Sarin’s chosen technology LTE? Is it fair to ask Motorola and Nortel, both of whom came out the losers in the race for UMTS contracts, to abandon a technology that could re-elevate them to the global ranks of infrastructure vendors? Does Ericsson have the right to push the industry to universally adopt the technology at the end of a standards chain it so clearly dominates?

Competing standards don’t make life easy. They generate risks and uncertainties. But standards and the free-market don’t gel. And often that uncertainty does produce some amazing innovation in the industry. I won’t hazard an opinion over whether LTE is a superior technology to WiMAX, but I do know that if it weren’t for the advent of WiMAX we wouldn’t be talking about LTE right now. We wouldn’t be talking about 4G, and we wouldn’t be debating the new -- and rather exciting -- business models that 4G is generating.

Contact me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.