Did Apple shaft Aussie telcos on the iPad?

Renai LeMay
Monday, 10 May 2010 11:30

Your IT - Mobility

Microsoft Office 365

opinion I find it incredibly hard to believe that Australia’s mobile telcos would not be falling over themselves in naked lust to sell the Apple iPad when it launches in Australia on 28 May.

After all, the telcos have their previous experience with the iPhone over the past two years to inform their future decisions, and that experience has been extremely one-sided.

The iPhone sold like hotcakes in Australia from launch day, and has revolutionised the mobile phone market in only two short years. Optus capitalised on that opportunity with nicely targeted plans aimed specifically at the iPhone and took a large slice of the mobile market as a result — particularly in the early adopter segment.

Even Telstra, I thought, which can at times appear to be a slow, lumbering elephant, couldn’t possibly misunderstand the opportunity the second time around. Wouldn’t Telstra and VHA be coming out with all guns blazing, to ensure they won a slice of the big, fat, juicy iPad pie and make up for their relative loss on the iPhone front?

That’s why I was shocked by the revelation yesterday that neither Telstra or Optus would be directly selling the iPad from their retail stores (we don’t know about VHA yet).

As I wrote the news stories about the telcos, just one thought was crossing my mind: Are they completely insane? Don’t they want to make money? What the hell is going on here?

And then it hit me. It’s not that Telstra and Optus don’t want to sell the iPad. The problem must be that Apple has simply cut them out of the loop. If you look back on several revelations made by the telcos over the past few months, this theory starts to make a lot of sense.

Firstly there was the news broken in late April by MacTheMag that Apple was cutting tier two resellers in Australia — over the long weekend they received an email letting them know they were no longer permitted to sell Apple hardware. This, taken by itself, is not so much of a big deal — most of Apple’s major resellers in Australia were still on the books.

But there is also the noticeable reticence by Telstra, Optus and VHA over the past few months to say anything at all about the iPad apart from the fact that they would be selling dedicated iPad pricing. I and others had chalked up the telcos’ silence on the iPad as the normal effect of Apple’s reality distortion field.

The telcos, the thinking went, were so scared of Apple that they didn’t want to say anything and jinx their relationships with the iconic technology supplier. But what if the opposite was true? What if all along, all three telcos knew for a fact that they wouldn’t be selling the iPad in Australia and simply didn’t want to publicise this embarassing fact?

At this point, this theory seems more than likely.