T-Mobile continues to lose customers and the head honchos there aren’t shy about admitting that its largely due to the fact that they don’t carry the iPhone.
During the Morgan Stanley 12th Annual Technology, Media & Telecoms Conference in Barcelona, Spain, T-Mobile USA COO Jim Alling explained, “Make no mistake about it: We would love to carry the iPhone. However, we want the economies to be right for us.”
Further, Alling said that T-Mobile wouldn’t be comfortable signing an iPhone contract similar to the one Sprint signed with Apple prior to the iPhone 4S release. You might remember that Spring effectively bet the farm on the iPhone to the extent it agreed to purchase a certain number of iPhones (estimated to be 30 million units) regardless of whether or not they’d be able to sell them. Add on high subsidy fees and there’s no doubting that it was a risky gamble on Sprint’s part. That said, Sprint thus far has been happy with the effects of the iPhone on its network in both keeping customers and attracting new ones. Still, Sprint CEO said that the company won’t really begin recouping its initial iPhone investment until sometime in 2014.
Alling added that the company realizes that the lack of the iPhone “has has been a point of churn for us.”
Tue, Nov 20, 2012
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