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Why AT&T Wants To Keep the iPhone Away From Verizon
Hugh Pickens writes "Saul Hansell of the NY Times has an interesting post analyzing AT&T's earnings report and highlighting the enormous stakes involved in the renewal of its exclusive contract to distribute Apple's iPhone in the United States. Hansell does some rough calculations: 'If the average iPhone customer brings in $90 a month, or $1,080 a year in revenue, and the operating profit margin stays constant at 26 percent, that means an iPhone customer represents at least $561 in operating profit over a two-year contract,' says Hansell. 'Put another way, if the company gets 2.5 million new customers a year because of its iPhone exclusivity, the deal represents at least $700 million a year in operating profits — profits that it could lose if Verizon sold the iPhone, too.' With those sort of numbers, AT&T has every reason to make Apple an offer it can't refuse to keep its exclusive deal for another few years. Of course, the incentives for Verizon are presumably the mirror image, so expect Verizon to come to Cupertino, checkbook in hand, to see what sort of deal they can make. 'The benefit of somewhat more iPhone sales from wide distribution is likely to be swamped by a huge bid from AT&T to keep exclusivity, and an equally high bid from Verizon to win some (or maybe even all) of the business for itself.'"
GPS is locked out on my 8830 from Verizon. I needed to buy a bluetooth GPS device to go geocaching.
Apple said from the beginning it did not want to use CDMA because of its limited range to only North America. GSM is used around the world. Verizon Wireless execs have recently said (check out macrumors and appleinsider.com for the specifics) they don't expect to make an offer to carry iPhones until they roll out 4G LTE technology (aka the next GSM version), the same 4G technology ATT is using.
You won't see an non-ATT iPhone until LTE hits.
last year called they want their criticism back.
when i first got the 3G network performance was bad. Over the last six month AT&T has brought it almost to the point where the iphone processor is the limiting factor. With rendering times almost equal between 3G and wi-fi.
What really gets me though is verizon can never have the iphone. Ever. It would have to be made exclusively for verizon customers. As Verizon uses phone technology that is incompatible with the majority of the world. GSM may not be the best solution, however it does have the largest user base. When will people understand this?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The article claims that both AT&T and Verizon will be moving to LTE in the future. If this ever comes to pass, and Apple releases an LTE-compatible iPhone, the technology roadblock should vanish.
Switching from a GSM phone to a CDMA phone is simple, on the software side it's a matter of changing a few low level AT commands, and on the hardware side it's a matter of swapping out the modem. If Apple chooses to do it, they will.
Furthermore, you've done bad research. Not only did Apple consider making a CDMA phone, Verizon completely rejected them. In essence neither the latter half nor the former half of your post has merit.
Qxe4