Which Aussie operator will get the iPhone?

Stuart Corner
Friday, 06 July 2007 03:49

Your IT - Mobility

Australia has been one of Apple's strongest markets outside the US since the launch of the Macintosh back in 1984. So with a cellphone-crazy population where every man, woman and child seems to own a mobile it could be high on the list of targets for what seems to be the iPhone's inexorable progress to world-domination.

News coming out of Europe, as yet unofficial, is that the largest players in the three largest nations - T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France and O2 in the UK - have scored the exclusive right to sell the much sought after device, squashing speculation that Vodafone, the world's largest operator, would get a pan-European deal.

One explanation given of this is that the 2G iPhone won't be able to exploit the full functionality of Vodafone's 3G WCDMA network. However given that the common factor between the three rumoured iPhone partners is market leadership, this would seem to be the main factor in Apple's choice of partner.

So in Australia, the choice would clearly be Telstra. At 31 December Telstra had 8.89 million cellular customers and Vodafone 3.4 million; at 31 March, Optus had 6.74 million and 3 about 1.3 million.

However, Telstra more than any other GSM operator in the World, is committed to a 3G network that the current version of the iPhone wil not work on. It has invested $1 billion in a nationwide 3G WCDMA network operating at 850MHz (for which there are as yet few handsets) and has made it very clear that it intends this to be its primary network going forward.

Technical limitations aside, Telstra would likely be the most attractive partner for Apple: not only because of its market leadership but because of its aggressive, and expensive, pursuit of ever more market share. The promotion of Next G since its launch in October 2006 has been relentless, pervasive and is paying off.

At the company's half year results announcement in February, CEO, Sol Trujillo said: "We have now surpassed 1.2 million 3G subscribers, and...we now have 415,000 Next G customers. We are on track to live up to our forecast of October of becoming the market leader by May 2007 in the 3G space. Given what has been announced so far by our competitors, we estimate that we have gained around 60 percent of net 3G adds in the period and are nearing 40 per cent 3G market share."

There will be a 3G iPhone sooner I suspect rather than later, but I would not bank on it operating at the 850MHz of Telstra's Next G network. So Telstra might be somewhat reluctant to take it on. Rivals would likely jump at the chance.

Given the huge hype surrounding the product, if Telstra as the largest player were to be given first bite of the cherry (or should that be Apple) it might be a case of taking it on just to keep Apple from going with its rivals. Products evolve fast in the mobile industry and you can be sure that eventually network incompatibilities will cease to be an issue.