There's no business like iPhone business - at all

David M Williams
Thursday, 10 July 2008 14:24

Your IT - Mobility

Hoorah! It's iPhone-eve! The world will be watching as the clock draws towards midnight ... except one segment of phone buyers who have been totally excluded. In a mess of mixed messages the telcos seem to have hired the famous Seinfeld soup Nazi as their director of enterprise and government pricing. That’s right, "No iPhone for you" despite the claims it's a better business device than BlackBerry.

UPDATED: I got one! *** Let me tell you my story. By day I’m CIO for a large national Australian company. We spend over $35K/month with Telstra for voice and data. A reasonable portion of this is our fleet of mobile phones. We belong on a corporate plan. This gives us corporate voice call rates, we have uncharged calls between the mobiles on our plan and our included usage is pooled across all our phones giving maximal benefit.

We buy phones. We make phone calls, lots of them. We send loads of e-mails. We have a private multi-office data network. We have servers in co-location facilities. We are introducing VoIP on our desks. We run mobile phones, BlackBerrys, 3G modems and even a satellite phone for our really remote work.

As a technophile, I looked keenly at the iPhone. Ok, maybe I bought into the i-hype, but I want one. And both Apple and the telcos aimed their marketing at me. Given there is still no 3G/NextG BlackBerry – yet – we have staff who opt to carry two devices; their BlackBerry for mail and their NextG mobile phone for coverage in rural locations. This isn’t always their desired way of working. So, when Apple and the phone companies tell me the iPhone will support push e-mail, that it can handle ActiveSync and integrate with Microsoft Exchange, they’re talking to people like me. They want to get their corporate customers on board.

The waiting game began. Would Telstra release the iPhone or not? Vodafone and Optus came out and said they would. Finally Telstra threw their hat in the ring. I placed an order with my usual account rep for an iPhone to try out.

This week he came back and told me he couldn’t fulfil the order: Telstra aren’t making the iPhone available through their corporate fulfilment channels. The reasoning, he told me, was the iPhone has “to go onto specific plans for the iPhone (so that Apple gets a commission... apparently the same for all carriers) and the plans are not the same as your current plans.”

I don’t want to go to a store, and I don’t want to sign up for some plan which I know nothing about. I imagined I could – as usual – buy an iPhone outright and put my existing SIM card in it, being charged at the usual rates and with the usual corporate plan inclusions.

Being a regular reader of iTWire I knew Optus would be selling the iPhone outright, although it was locked to their network. For $80 they will unlock it. So, does this mean I could go and buy a handset from Optus, pay the additional fee and be up and running?

CONTINUED