Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Following legal action by Vodafone, T-Mobile is selling unlocked iPhones for €999, compared with the €399 charged for the device on a two-year contract.
The company has made it clear that it only expects the measure to be last until the court makes a final ruling, and is still talking about seeking damages from Vodafone.
The €600 premium is approximately half the cost of the minimum tariff over the two year contract, giving some insight to the cost of delivering the service and Apple's share of the ongoing revenue.
T-Mobile is also offering to unlock iPhones that it has already sold, but it seems those customers will be held to their contracts. It seems sensible to take advantage of the offer while it lasts, even if the owner has no immediate plans to use a different carrier.
Unlocking may be popular with people who travel overseas regularly and would prefer to use a local carrier's SIM in order to avoid expensive roaming charges.
iPhone buyers choosing to use other networks will lose the ability to use the device's visual voicemail feature. The T-Mobile contracts also include access to the company's network of Wi-Fi hotspots.
According to reports, Orange will also be pricing unlocked iPhones at €999 when they go on sale in France next week. When purchased with a contract, the price will be €399.
It seems that laws in the UK and US do not insist on customers being given the option of buying unlocked phones free of contract. The going price on eBay for an unofficially unlocked iPhone is $US500-600, whereas €999 is approximately $US1480. It therefore seems unlikely there will be much leakage of French and German iPhones to other countries.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
