There have been two very interesting developments in the last few days regarding Apple’s Iphone. Currently O2, a mobile carrier owned by Spain’s Telefonica, has exclusive rights to sell the Iphone in the UK market. It looks like this is all about to change starting 2010.
First on 28-Sep-2009 an announcement was made by Orange UK that Apple struck a deal that gave them rights to sell the Iphone in the UK starting in 2010. This comes on the heels of an announcement made earlier this month about a merger between Orange UK and T-Mobile UK that would create the largest mobile operator in Britain.
Second on 29-Sep-2009 Vodafone made an announcement that they had struck a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone in 2010.
So if we look at all of the large operators in the UK, we have O2, Vodafone and Orange/T-Mobile all with the rights to sell a device that drives an exponential growth in traffic on mobile networks. But where is British Telecom in all of this?
British Telecom has no mobile retail arm anymore since they sold O2 to Telefonica a few years ago but BT does have a vested interest in this market as they are the single largest mobile backhaul wholesaler in the UK. They have already signed contracts with Vodafone and O2 for mobile backhaul services and these new announcements are sure to have the network and capacity planners at BT considering how to cope with the impending bandwidth boom.
All in all I see this is an enormous opportunity as there is no better driver for infrastructure investment than pent-up consumer demand of high-value/high-margin services.
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