AT&T announced to its shareholders that it’s iPhone agreement with Apple underwent some substantial changes with the release of the iPhone 3G. AT&T’s press release reads:
“The new agreement between Apple and AT&T eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which AT&T shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple. Under the revised agreement, which is consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements, there is no revenue sharing and both iPhone 3G models will be offered at attractive prices to broaden the market potential and accelerate subscriber volumes.”
Now of course this substantive change in agreement between Apple and AT&T has the net all a twitter with the possibility that Apple will begin marketing the iPhone 3G on other networks. Even AT&T’s statement that their relationship with Apple is now “consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements…” would seem to imply that Apple’s side of the arrangement is also “typical”, meaning that after a predetermined period of exclusivity, they can market their handsets to other carriers.
There are articles at CNET and MacWorld that arrive at this conclusion, and speculate that Apple soon will market the iPhone 3G on other carriers in the US.
The only difficultly is, that it ain’t gonna happen, not right now or anytime we’d call “soon”.
That’s because there’s only one other national GSM carrier and T-Mobile’s 3G network is Voice Only.
That tends to suggest that there isn’t what we call a “Business Opportunity” for iPhone 3G on T-Mobile’s network right now. Of course original iPhones running software 2.0 would be great to have, except Apple seems to have stopped making them.
(note: there are technical details in the comments that are too boring to include in the post)
Leigh McMullen leads the Advisory Services & Strategy practices for the professional services arm of one of the Big-Five firms. He has written several books that would cure any insomnia you might have, and is an avid Mac junkie.
