Another blow for FT; court upholds ruling against iPhone exclusivity
France Telecom is not in a good place right now. Imagine the time, negotiations and bags of money resources it took to score iPhone 3G exclusivity on Orange for a five-year term all to see things evaporate thanks to the scrappy Bouygues Telecom. Appealing to the Competition Council, Bouygues contested that this exclusivity agreement seriously undermined competition in the mobile space due to the excessive length of the agreement. Despite obvious opposition from both France Telecom and Apple, the Competition Council concurred and decided in December to cap such exclusive agreements at a substantially abbreviated three months. Body blow! Needless to say, FT and Apple went right to work fighting the decision but an appeals court ruled today that the decision would be upheld. Upper cut! Apple and FT plan to take their appeal to Cour de Cassation, France’s Supreme Court, while Apple slyly plays both sides by undertaking negotiations with Bouygues to offer the iPhone 3G on its network. T.K.O. Apple stands to benefit either way of course and as such, the company appears to be fairly brazen in its handling of the situation. FT on the other hand, has everything to lose – including a healthy portion of its customer base on Orange. Bouygues, currently the number three operator in the French region, would undoubtedly couple iPhone availability with some incredibly attractive rates to lure customers away. Hmm. We have to wonder what AT&T’s 2008 would have looked like with the iPhone on multiple US carriers…
[Via AppleInsider]
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Ma Bell has been riding the iPhone white cloud for some time now.
Despite probably the receipient of more network related complaints and outages than any other US carrier, people still flock to at&t to get a piece of the iPhone.
I’m tired of all these carrier exclusivity agreements too. Apple can still deny a carrier rights to sell the device if mutual terms aren’t agreed to, but at least give everyone the opportunity.
I’m sure there are plenty of Verizon, T-Mobile USA and Sprint customers who would never consider going to at&t if it wasn’t for the iPhone. I was one of them. I left T-Mobile for the iPhone 3G but ported back before my 30 day grace period due to network related problems.
Yeah, I too left Verizon for the iPhone!! I never thought I’d do it but I did.
After the 1 week infatuation was over and the ATT network showed its true colors, I went right back to Verizon too.
I love the iPhone, don’t get me wrong, but I’d love it a lot more if I could use it on another carrier.
I’m with you Elizabeth: The iPhone should be available across all US carriers. We should be able to decide which carrier we want to use and the manufacturers should be prohibited from service provider discrimation.
I’d love for all phones to be on all carriers, too, but no one in the US used to subsidized phones would ever be willing to pay non-subsidized pricing…
I love the Verizon network but their phones totally suck. Add me to the list who would also love to be able to use a phone on the network of choice. Imagine buying a brand of vehicle and being told you can only use a particular brand of gasoline because that vehicle manufacturer has an exclusive contract with that brand of gas? Imagine buying a DVD player and being told you can only play Paramount’s movies on it because they have a deal with them?
Well maybe by the year 2012, if there isn’t a new world order and LTE networks are fully deployed in the US we can have some real competition based on price and network performance, and not the phones themseleves. The cost of hardware pales in comparrison to the cost of the contract, even moreso if you have unlimited everything.
I am glad they smacked Apple around some. One of my devices is the iPhone, and I hope this sim lock and ATT rape nonsense ends sooner.
Ps. Blame verizon and sprint for wanting to be different from the rest of the world and deploying CDMA. Perhaps I am a gadget nerd, but to me there are only two carriers left in the us – ATT and tmobile. I like the ability to use almost any device on the market.
Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone).
To quote niftydl:
“I like the ability to use almost any device on the market”
Amen amen amen….
During the week, I carry my 8320 Curve when I am at work, and simply swap the SIM card to the 8900 Curve on days off. Can’t do that on Big Red or Sprint…
@niftydl: Verizon (Bell Atlantic Mobile and Airtouch Cellular) and Sprint adopted CDMA way before GSM was the world standard… at the time, it was clearly technologically superior to the much more primitive GSM systems and provided a more robust signal. (In fact, Sprint’s first test wireless network was GSM as “Sprint Spectrum”, they changed it over to CDMA due to performance issues) It’s a distortion of the situation to claim they did it because they wanted to be “different than the rest of the world”.
Swapping phones on the Sprint network is as easy as logging into their website. Maybe not as easy as slapping a SIM into it. But the whole process takes like 30 seconds. Trust me, I swap all the time.
There will come a day when the iphone will be released from the brig of the Death Star. And when it does gadget nerds everywhere will rejoice.
Some phones, like the iPhone and theTouch HD are worth the unsubsidized price. Hell, even the low end phones would be more useful if they werent so heinously crippled by the carriers. I once played around with SEEM edits on RAZRs from tmob and at&t and was appalled at the features they have disabled. It blows my mind! Especially because its lost revenue to them. Imagine how many more data plans they could sell if they enabled the email client or allowed apps like Opera or Salling Clicker. Its like selling a car with a turbocharger in it and disabling it. What the hell are these people thinking?
But back to the iPhone… Certainly, by this point, Apple has the leverage to get out of the contract with at&t… Its obvious by this point that the sales of the device from other carriers would dwarf any financial penalty incurred by breach of contract with the death star.
Me likes what “Henry” said!
AT&T could release the exclusivity in the US and it wouldn’t matter. TMobile 3G (what little there is) wouldn’t work and obviously the phone would be an iPod Touch on the CDMA networks of Verizon and Sprint. Seeing as how AT&T subsidizes the iPhone, don’t think it would be $199 at the Apple Store. A $400 iPhone on Tmobile that only works on EDGE I don’t think would sell too well, but then again I guess some people would buy it, but not a game changer.
The French!
To quote @EPS
“much more primitive GSM systems”
The choices were TDMA (US version), CDMA or GSM. GSM had many innovations such as SMS, SIM card, adaptive power management with GPRS on the horizon so I would not call it primitive. Although CDMA was superior in signalling and capacity the fallback was analog. GSM made a clean break and this enabled huge innovations in handset design. There was also the scale (clearly Europe and Asia were already going GSM) and in fact to this day Nokia and Sony Ericsson (two of the early leaders in UI and device design) never made CDMA phones for Sprint or VZW.
While I do have an iPhone, I am not an apple fanboy. It’s the only apple product I own. But those of you who tried an iPhone and blamed AT&T for bad service, before 2.2, the iPhone was to blame for a lot of the network issues. Plus it also depends where you live. In phoenix, AT&T 3G coverage is near perfect! But we all know that we’re never going to see phones unlocked. These carries pay a good chuck of money to pull in the big phones. But I’ll keep praying with every one
Nokia’s made plenty of CDMA phones on VZW, I’ve used one myself back when, and they have a few today too I believe. (Smartphones are another matter, admittedly) I do admit that calling GSM “primitive” was probably going a bit too far. (My main point was that 2G GSM depends on TDMA- damn confusing acronyms, I don’t mean D-AMPS)
I wouldn’t really say that Asia was clearly going GSM in the 1990s… Japan had its own standards, India and Korea had CDMA carriers, China Mobile only launched in the latter half of the decade…
The biggest reason Nokia didn’t put much effort into the CDMA camp had to do with refusing to pay Qualcomm royalty fees for the privilege. Those two giants never seemed to get along well.
That is why most Nokia CDMA variants were on the low end even though they generally performed above average in the RF department.
I believe Nokia regretted this in the long run as it began to lose huge market share here in the United States to newer players like LG.
Sony Ericsson had similar issues with Qualcomm.
Ugly politics continue to pop their heads up in the mobile industry today forcing consumers to switch carriers just to get an exclusive device. Everything is done on purpose.
I believe AT&T knows it can’t sell enough users on it’s network alone. That is why Cingular bought them in the first place…. to gain customers it would never gain organically. Their network is still poorly designed (although very large) and without the iPhone I feel AT&T would not be in such a rosy place today.
AT&T knows it has a gold mine as long as people don’t start failing to pay their required monthly data fee in mass numbers.
HAHA nice article the punch out reference is hilarious. As for what Henry says about carriers disabling so many useful features in their phones that could bring in a stream of revenue, that’s true. But, this is done on purpose it allows them to manage their network bandwidth better and prevent certain bandwidth hungry apps they don’t like from bogging their network down.
Any chance some carrier can challenge AT&T in court over this?
i’m an ATT customer and have been for many years. For me, in this area they have the best coverage, therefore most people i know have ATT, making it cheaper for me (mobile-to-mobile).. but i seriously wish they would make the Iphone available to everyone, and every other phone too.. This would bring lower rates and more competition in prices and service. People wouldn’t be jumping from carrier to carrier for a phone, they would simply pick the BEST carrier for them and get which ever phone they wanted.. But of course if something sounds too good to be true, then….
@ Runciter:
You say it wouldn’t be a game changer to allow the iPhone to be sold on other carriers because it is only GSM and that T-Mobiles 3G network is almost non-existant. I understand the point you are making, but it seems a little invalid. AT&T might have a better 3G network than T-Mobile, but even it is spotty as far as coverage area, yet millions of iPhones have been sold outside of these 3G coverage areas. Even before the 3G version, people were going nuts trying to get the EDGE iPhone, so I don’t think you argument that iPhones would not sell well on carriers other than AT&T is a very good one.
Runciter, there’s a bigger point behind this… if Apple was free to work with the other US carriers, they would have no problem making EVDO and AWS-3 versions of the iPhone… if ya study up on your iPhone history, you would learn that Apple approached Verizon first about the iPhone before AT&T, but they passed after hearing apple’s demands. think they would make that same mistake now knowing how popular the phone is?
Of course, this is something that should easily be expected by any big phone company when they have such “Evolved” phones to dangle and dazzle from.
Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone) at: Chicago IL, 60657