Of the 4.3 million iPhone subscribers that AT&T added to its books in 2008, about 40 percent of them were new customers. It’s that type of growth that has AT&T scrambling to retain its exclusivity arrangement with Apple, which is expected to expire next year. If that agreement were to expire, Apple would be free to take the iPhone to other wireless carriers, like T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless (though Apple would have to develop a CDMA version of the phone first to bring it to VZW).
Yeah, apparently it’s all part of AT&T’s grand scheme to remain relevant. With POTS drying up—AT&T has 77 million wireless customers to 30 million landline customers—the company is trying to expand into new and exciting ventures. It’s hard to call the iPhone anything but a success for AT&T, but it needs to look beyond the phone that Jobs built in order to fend off the likes of Verizon Wireless, what with its FIOS Internet and TV service that every teenager in America wants (in order to leave uTorrent running 24/7).
A small suggestion: improve call quality in New York City. Not to keep harping on this, but the call quality of even the cheapest VZW phone is much better than the iPhone in New York, not even counting the dropped calls and severed Internet connection. See this comedian’s book for more on the subject of why the iPhone can be pretty annoying in New York.
Photo: Flickr
I hear the call quality of the iPhone is garbage anyways, regardless of *where* you are – but cannot attest to this myself. All I can say is I’ve had AT&t/Cingular/at&t for a long, long time – I’m in NYC about twice a month – and my call quality has always been great and have never been on street level and not gotten a signal. You should try their network with a phone that’s not the iPhone, maybe it would be a better experience? GSM is pretty widely recognized as being a higher quality signal over CDMA, so I’ve got to wonder if its the phone.
As for the iPhone moving to Verizon, that’s an interesting question. On the one hand, there are the costs associated with developing an all new technology for CDMA. I could argue its cost prohibitive with little chance for future growth, since the United States is basically the only country in the world with a CDMA network. But I think South Korea or Taiwan actually uses CDMA as well, so maybe there is more upside there than people realize.
The other argument is battery life, and from what I’m told the battery life on the iPhone is abysmal. The iPhone would certainly get better battery performance on a CDMA network, which is definitely an upside. But I’m forced to wonder if Apple wouldn’t handicap that advantage – they probably don’t want the iPhone competing with the iPhone.
True, CDMA is a dead end.
However, Verizon is CDMA, and they’re the carrier with the most subscribers, in the country where the iPhone is most popular.
By giving CDMA the cold shoulder, Apple is ignoring more than half of the wireless market in the US. There’s way too much money to be made on CDMA, in the states, for Apple to ignore it for long.
Besides, Verizon does have a huge 3G network, and they have designs on going even bigger for 4G. If you’re manufacturing kick ass multimedia phones, Verizon’s network will be the place to be, down the road.
Techcrunch desperately needs to investigate the fact that ATT broadband is not keeping up with iPhone bandwidth demand and all ATT broadband users, including DSL households, are being negatively impacted because of all the rush hour iPhone use. The internet is broken and ATT did it because these monopolies can’t do anything but sit on their hands and consult their frigging lawyers.
“ATT broadband is not keeping up with iPhone bandwidth demand”
Kind of a funny thing to say far a device that started out with no 3G version when pretty much every phone made 2 years before it was released came with 3G standard.
The surprising thing is that the biggest carrier, Verizon, is the last company left that does not have a big name phone. They are slolwly digging their own grave. ATT=iPhone … Tmobile=Gphone … Sprint=Pre … Verizon=proprietary software. While they are fine now, the younger generations that are now getting older (imagine that), buying their own phones, are going to skip Verizon if they don’t get something decent soon.
Verizon needs a mentality change that is for sure. Apple will certainly stay with ATT but developing a phone for Verizon’s technology is not difficult. It adds to Apples manufacturing complexity but they can handle it.
Clearly an iPhone on Verizon would double Apples USA market share. That is hard to fight against.
iPhone is very beautiful phone
It’s not just the iPhone that has problems in new york, it’s lots of other devices as well and it’s mostly due to a network of rogue multifreq signal jammers being hidden in sewer grates, insides of mail boxes and other sneaky places. These bad boys cost less than fifty bucks, can go for two weeks on two AA lithium batteries and jam all known cell phone freqs in a six block radius.
ATT has to drop off the price if this happens :)
I would become rather happy if ATNT lost exclusitivity.
Not because I want an iPhone or anything, but because I am tired of ATT bending-over-backwards to satisfy Apple’s every whim and wish just to keep selling the damn things. Apple is forcing them to put restrictions and make exceptions that they do not put on any other phone, biggest one being you are not allowed to unlock it even though they allow you to unlock any other phone they carry.
interesting article…to bad they couldn’t match the photo with the most recent phone though…3G has been out for how long now???