The European carrier Vodafone (News - Alert) has announced that it will be laying off 500,000 German workers.

"We have started a two-year program," a spokesperson for Vodafone told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Rheinische Post.

Some of the jobs will be transferred to Romania and India with lower starting salaries.

Vodafone, better known to Americans as Verizon, is competing with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile (News - Alert) and its no-contract smartphone plans.

As its parent company cuts jobs in Germany, Verizon is finding ways to cut costs in the U.S. market. It has extended a phone upgrade plan waiting period from 20 months to 24 months, mandating that its customers must wait to get those shiny new smartphones and tablets on their contract plans starting in January.

The move also comes amid strong competition in the mobile industry. Dish Network has announced its intention to buy the carrier Sprint Nextel, which could scuttle a deal already announced by Softbank to acquire the carrier.

“The Dish offer for Sprint (News - Alert) is compelling and overall a bold move. This offer will not only pressure a response from Softbank, it may also ripple through the entire industry with impacts on the cable TV industry and Sprint's primary mobile competitors AT&T (News - Alert), Verizon and T-Mobile," Kevin Roe, an analyst at Roe Equity Research, wrote to his clients as reported in The Guardian.

The move would allow dish to offer a broader portfolio of services than its satellite TV service, serving as a hedge against the growing number of “cord-cutters” who are moving to online video and bringing out the rabbit ears to supplement their subscriptions with over-the-air programming.

Verizon (News - Alert)/Vodafone’s main competitor, T-Mobile, has also ditched contracts entirely, moving away from the standard phone subsidies and long-term contracts that have characterized the U.S. mobile industry, instead moving toward selling phones on installment plans.