You win some and you lose some has always seemed to be Virgin’s business model. In the case of Virgin Mobile USA, the pre-paid phones venture of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, it has been mostly the latter.

Virgin Mobile USA has put in a spectacularly bad performance since its US initial public offering in October. It floated at $15 a share and closed yesterday at just over $2 a share. It has dropped steadily since the IPO and last week lurched downwards on a gloomy earnings forecast.

The business is a joint venture with Sprint Nextel which sells pre-paid phones aimed at young people. It has been doing badly in a soggy market: there is increasing competition among operators and the US shows signs of being near capacity for mobile phone penetration.

Things are not particularly great for mobile operators and manufacturers in general at the moment. Sony Ericcson issued an earnings warning yesterday and its shares - and those of Nokia - both fell sharply.

Sir Richard can take comfort that Virgin Group offloaded about 11 per cent of its original 47 per cent stake in Virgin Mobile USA in the IPO. On the other hand, it still holds about one third of the company.

Nor does it help his sometimes strained relations with stock market investors. Some of his misadventures were detailed in this FT article.

A follow-up to my earlier post on competing mobile telephone standards in the US. As it happens, just after I wrote, Verizon Wireless announced that it will test a GSM-compatible technology known as Long Term Evolution for its next generation mobile technology. The FT story can be read here.

This raises the interesting possibility that the US will end up converging on GSM standards rather than CDMA technology for fourth-generation mobile networks. AT&T and T-Mobile have already adopted GSM technology and Verizon’s decision, if it goes through, would leave Sprint as the odd one out.

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Jim Surowiecki, the astute financial columnist of the New Yorker, wrote an article that I admired in Wired magazine five years ago, arguing that the US approach to technology standards for mobile phones was superior to that of Europe.

Essentially, Surowiecki said that the European approach of mandating a single technology standard in GSM had shut down technological progress, while the US decision to allow GSM to compete with other standards, including CDMA, had allowed the best technology to win.

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Column on the Financial Times comment page

Google is a very big company: its share price broke $700 on Wednesday. It has a market capitalisation of more than $200bn and its revenues are higher than those of AOL, MSN and Yahoo combined. Google has also been known to throw its weight around in a self-interested manner: its attitudes to privacy and copyright infringement are dubious.

But, in the world of mobile phones, Google is an upstart with an agenda that could not only help the company itself but the public as a whole. It wants to break open a closed world built by mobile network operators – particularly those in the US – to protect themselves from competition and consumer choice.

Continue reading this column here. Please post comments below.

I remember some years ago talking to an American friend who was visiting London and was astonished to find everyone walking around talking into a mobile phone. What is the point of this craze? she asked. Why should people need to keep talking in this bizarre way?

We know where that ended up. Americans followed Europeans into the mobile phone craze and are just as prone to whip them out at any opportunity now.

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