T-Mobile outs itself as German Iphone supplier
Web posting spawns kerfuffle — APPLE WILL put its iDogandbone on T-Mobile's network in Germany, it seems. — At least, a promotional page for the mobile phone appeared briefly on T-Mobile's German pages here yesterday.
Context & Ripple Effects
T-Mobile's German operation has had a crowded few weeks: the parent group launched its [[a:none|HotSpot@Home]] cellular-WiFi convergence service in late June, and on July 16 a court intervened in its blocking of calls to VoIP upstart Truphone — a fight that put T-Mobile's competitive behavior under scrutiny.
Against that backdrop, a promotional page briefly appearing on T-Mobile's German site yesterday is the first public signal of who carries the iPhone in Germany. The relationship is still unconfirmed — neither Apple nor T-Mobile has said anything — but the page's existence means the leak is doing the announcing for them.
First-order effects
- If the page reflects a signed arrangement, T-Mobile locks up the German iPhone launch while rival European carriers are left waiting on Apple, and Deutsche Telekom's consumer arm inherits the pressure of an exclusive it has not yet acknowledged.
- The leak strips both companies of control over the announcement calendar: T-Mobile must now either confirm or awkwardly deny an arrangement its own web pages advertised.
Second-order effects
- Other European operators now have to decide how much concession they will accept to win equivalent deals, since the US launch demonstrated the iPhone's power to define a carrier's handset lineup.
- For T-Mobile specifically, an iPhone exclusive would hand it a premium halo device to pair with the HotSpot@Home convergence pitch at exactly the moment the Truphone court fight has made it look anti-competitive.
Third-order effects
- If Apple repeats its single-carrier-per-country model across Europe, handset exclusivity becomes a structural fault line in the market: operators compete less on network price and more on which phones they alone can sell, shifting bargaining power toward the device maker.
The trend: Apple is parcelling out national iPhone exclusives across Europe, and carrier-side leaks are setting the pace of each announcement.