AT&T Insiders Report iPhone Exclusivity Going Away On Wednesday

Verizon would definitely be on top of the list for Apple. It has the largest amount of active subscribers, and has the largest coverage area wise of any carrier. And they'll start rolling out their 4G network later this year.

At&T is the best carrier and I can't believe that anyone believe's those bad ads about the map coverage. What a joke, they are involved in a very large law suit over the mis-information the Verizon is sending out. Whenever there is an exclusive, it always comes to an end, AT&T saw the advantage to the iPhone in the beginning (when none of the other carriers had the knowledge to see how well it would take off) and were smart to lock in an exclusive. Boy, It's hard to believe that people are so gullable and believe anything they hear on commercials!! We have tried every other carrier there is and NONE stand up to the service, coverage and non-dropped calls that AT&T (Cingular) provides. The speed of AT&T's 3G will way exceed the others 4G and then all those customers will be crying and complaining. Do your homework people and don't get sucked in by the lies.

Rofl; Granna they may have coverage where you are that is up to par. However; in general there coverage map is significantly smaller than Verizon's. I know this not because of the commercial, but because of research and usage before the map ad's ever started. I dropped Cingular service after my first family contract expired and went back to Verizon because they were better than Sprint and those were my choices and At&t coverage was so choppy. The other thing is that there is no way 3G will beat 4G coverage it is scientifically impossible.

@ Granna. You should really do some investigating before you spout off things you obviously have no clue about. First off, Verizon was Apple's first pick for an exclusive carrier when the iPhone first came out, but Verizon turned Apple down. Why did Verizon turn them down? Most sources say that Apple wanted to much control and money off subs, but who really knows. Maybe Verizon just turned them down to invest their money into making their 3G network larger and more stable than AT&T's. Second, as far as people being gullible and the lawsuit your referring to, the maps Verizon shows are actually correct. If you take notice to the bottom of their maps it says, "3G Coverage", not overall coverage. Furthermore, AT&T has made no statements saying these maps are at all incorrect nor have they denied it, the basis of their lawsuit is that it gives customers the sense that AT&T has no coverage outside of the 3G area. Funny how AT&T tries to retort with their lame Luke Wilson commercials yet make no mention at all about their 3G coverage when that's what Verizon is pointing out in the first place. It is a FACT that Verizon has a larger more widespread 3G network. As for the speeds of AT&T's 3G being faster, it's so minuscule that the average user would not even notice a difference, I mean we are talking 100-300kbps if that and that's only with full 3G service.

Yeah Hybrid Granna was just spouting off I think. The funny part about all of it is the lawsuit was thrown out a week or two ago. The new commercials like the headless download on Verizon thats so messed up was after there lawsuit was ruled invalid. Oh and that is the second lawsuit the first one had already been thrown out. So At&t lost two lawsuits from what I understand and I imagine had too pay Verizon's legal costs to. The main thing about all this is like you pointed out in the bottom right corner of all the commercials is states for 3G coverage only on both maps.

As for At&t's 3g being good that's basically a joke. He must live in one of the markets where they have already done there 3G upgrades to the higher end of 3G. The big joke is most providers besides At&t and T-Mobile I think is there partner network (Verizon and Sprint) are rolling out 4G as we speak, my city centrally (Atlanta) has been done for a couple of months. From what I understand I can get it if I go with Sprint (and I am 45 minutes north of Atlanta) now. So I would assume I can partially get it through Verizon now but on the Sprint towers, I am hoping soon I will be able to fully receive it with Verizon.

did the announcement today say anything anything about the iPhone exclusivity?

Figured he was probably just a troll, but also figured someone should educate him despite the fact.  I'm on the south side of Atlanta myself  :)

Lets NOT go there about AT&T being a great service. You obviously never saw MY article in print and online in print about my 7 hour ordeal of returning 1 phone. It was such a stink the president in the northeast AT&T region phoned me, offered to let me out of my contract (3 lines) and sent me a brand new Windows based PDA to "hush" me. I kid you not.

I had had AT&T like many people for 3 yrs or more. This happened fall 2009. I called customer care at 7:30am and my neighbors were coming home from work, the sun went down and I was still standing outdoors ( crappy signal where we live...of course) while everyone had dinner and ended their day.

Just recently we had a problem and this time I was on the phone almost 3 hours to correct a billing error. I don't know what the problem is with customer service this last year but it's taken a BIG NOSE DIVE. Sprint did me much better offering $99. a month for unlimited EVERYTHING, so we RAN from AT&T. So should everyone else!

Yeah; that's one thing I just don't get with At&t the wireless strategy. They are saying there working on a upgrade within 3G, rather than stepping up to 4G. Sprint has already rolled out 4G at least partially and they are a Verizon tower partner as well. Then Verizon is rolling out it's own 4G LTE as well this year. That leaves At&t as the only major carrier running 3G in the US. You would think they would have used some of that great income, to upgrade there path at least to current b4 the I-phones started to eat there network as well as their public status. One of the funny things is there current commercials which state you cannot use a phone while surfing on Verizon. That's flat untrue it all depends on the phone if it is a current smart phone especially a Droid or Droid Eris you can surf and use the phone simultaneously no problem. It basically depends what network segment your on the Touch pro2's and anything equivalent can do the same.

their fail

So it's not viable to expect an Android based iPhone running Chrome on Wednesday?

I heard that it might not be the iPhone, but just their eBook/Tablet PC that they announce that will be able to be bought with Verizon service.

It might be both, we don't know at this point. What they do know is that Apple execs have been talking with Verizon and that the AT&T contract is set to expire. So a Verizon-Apple partnership is a distinct possibility

Also we know that EA has been in talks with Apple regarding games for a "new platform". I think they mean the tablet.

3 days now though, time to jump in on the Apple stock?

iphone would stay with AT&T after all... that is my 2 cent :)

I don't really understand them still being with any cellular provider in a singular agreement. After the first I-phone did as well as it did I would have dropped exclusivity on a dime. Because on multiple providers Apple stand to make more money, way more money. Plus no one will turn them away for sure or at least I would not see how other than if Google became a cellular carrier.

"We don't remember hearing about AT&T's "horrible network" before the iPhone--do you?"

I definitely do! I had AT&T for years (back when it was Cingular) and it was terrible. Dropped calls, missed texts, and lack of service where everyone else had service. I switched to Verizon and all those were problems were either completely fixed or close enough to it that it became a non-issue. On Verizon, dropping a call was a surprising event. Now that I am back on AT&T (father forced me to because I was only one not on the family plan and I now have an iPhone) a dropped call is routine and getting through an entire conversation without either having to call back or ask the other person to repeat themselves is an amazing feat! That simply is not good enough. I am switching back to Verizon as soon as my contract is up. And if the iPhone is there when I get there, all the better.

My first phone was Bellsouth Mobility which then flipped to At&t then Cingular now back to At&t any company that purposefully changes there name leaves me with some doubt. I mean if your a successful company why would you ever wanna change it's name really unless you joined with another company or something.

I had Verizon, which was really bad in the MD/DC area, so I switched to Cingular, but then they got bought by AT&T. That being said I've only have had jobs (since graduating) where it was a firing offense to bring a camera into work, so I've never had a smartphone or camera phone since switching off of verizon (I had a camera phone in college).

That being said, AT&T doesn't seem to have horrible coverage on the east coast, the second you pass the Appalachian mountains though, you are on your own lol

Lol, it's just corporate shenanigans. 

Originally, Cingular Wireless was a joint venture between SBC and BellSouth. Cingular then acquired AT&T Wireless (but not AT&T Inc). Then SBC acquired AT&T Inc and called it "The New AT&T". And when AT&T acquired BellSouth, Cingular Wireless became AT&T Wireless.

Did you get it? Me neither...

I haven't had much experience with other networks, but my brother who switched from AT&T (part of a company overhaul), very much prefers Verizon.

@rapid1

If you did some resarch, you would find that every name change form AT&T was associated with a joining with another company. Verizon is no different. They were formed by Bell Atlantic, GTE and Powertel. They just did their mergers a longer while ago. Heck, even T-Mobile is a merger. They used to be Voicestream and before that they were Omnipoint. Sprint is the only major company that hasn't had a name change.

By branchc on Jan 25, 2010

@rapid1

If you did some resarch, you would find that every name change form AT&T was associated with a joining with another company. Verizon is no different. They were formed by Bell Atlantic, GTE and Powertel. They just did their mergers a longer while ago. Heck, even T-Mobile is a merger. They used to be Voicestream and before that they were Omnipoint. Sprint is the only major company that hasn't had a name change.

-----

A couple of small corrections: Powertel never merged with GTE -> Verizon; Powertel briefly rebranded as VoiceStream before it becoming T-Mobile. (I didn't remember the Omnipoint merger involved here, because they weren't local ; maybe somebody else know the other companies absorbed.) CellularOne was the large cellular network bought by GTE before it merged with Bell Atlantic to become Verizon.

And yes, Sprint is the only one that hasn't changed names, because they were much later to the (wireless) game than the other players (no analog network, they started from scratch in the mid nineties) and thus the smallest of the major carriers; however, Sprint did buy Nextel in one of the most painful cellular system mergers in history.

Hopefully, the pending merger of Verizon and Alltel will run much more smoothly, since these two consistently garner the highest customer satisfaction marks in the industry. Now if only Alltel can cure Verizon of their relentless "we can charge for that" attitude toward every single beneficial feature on their network... :-)

A few years back I switched to AT&T because the Verizon network in our town was horrible. Verizon still has a large pocket of dead spots in the area of Massachusetts we're in. AT&T seems to hold calls better out here for some reason, though when I'm on the road, AT&T definitely seems to have network capacity issues/slow performance. In Vegas at CES, AT&T was a mess because every geek (like me) and their iPhone was out there on the network. I think AT&T would have been smart to let a little competition in, somewhere along the way with the iPhone but they obviously weren't.

Some of their network architects and engineers should be given the pink slip for not provisioning the resources properly to accommodate all the upside subscribers the iPhone brought them. It's not so much a cell site problem I don't think but rather just being over-subscribed. That and I've definitely seen my iPhone 3G take a knee on a regular basis when switching from 3G to Edge, which should have been worked out a long time ago but wasn't apparently.

I'm not sure that their network architects and engineers should be to blame for what seems to be an executive and managerial decision to milk profits without upgrading infrastructure which I am sure any of their decent network architects and engineers probably brought up.

Soups touche' ... right on, agreed, most likely it was someone Engineering Management weasel that probably made the call... or wait... it was dropped, so they probably couldn't make any call. :)

Dave_HH:

Soups touche' ... right on, agreed, most likely it was someone Engineering Management weasel that probably made the call... or wait... it was dropped, so they probably couldn't make any call. :)

The great thing about being an executive is that even if you fail, you have a nice severance package waiting for you. Also...you get to set your own pay pretty much. It was a decision made looking at the short term and now AT&T is paying for it.

rapid1:

I agree gibbersome if this were the case the early termination fines would disappear at least at a reasonable time line. This is if the market actually worked on validity of great service from a provider. This would also be the best for everyone (except the provider with the lowest coverage and or availability of specific services),

Yep, that would be another big advantage...no termination fees. Simply buy your own phone and you'd be set. One of the issues is that the mass public would miss the free phones they get with a 2 yr contract. Make no mistake, if people had to cough up $400 for each generation of Iphone, they would not be as prevalent.