Vodafone has dismissed any notion that operators are being sidelined in today’s mobile world by the likes of Apple and Google, with the world’s second-largest operator claiming that talk of carriers becoming just ‘dumb pipes’ is no longer relevant. “I’m not sure that it was ever really relevant, it’s a terminology that we tend to not express at Vodafone,” Lee Epting, director of content services at Vodafone Group, tells Mobile World Live in a new video. “We tend to actually talk about us as more of a smart network.”