Jon’s Network

I had an interesting evening with several T-Mobile employees about the iPhone today. I called up to get a new number for my old phone. I had arranged with them previously to port my number to the iPhone and replace it with a new number without incurring any penalties. T-Mobile’s charged me the $200 anyway and after working this out with customer care and just before sending me to activation, the rep asked how I like iPhone. I shared my opinion and he told me about some of the other phones on the market. He was most interested in the soft keyboard of the iPhone since he doesn’t like the soft keys on his T-Mobile Wing. The Wing has a pull out qwerty too so he doesn’t bother with the soft keys anymore. He mentioned a new phone that’s been released in Europe. It’s called the HTC Touch. HTC makes many of the phones for T-Mobile, including the Wing. The Touch looks similar to the iPhone at first glance. The iPhone has already affected mobile phone design. Here is a brief review of the Touch. Be sure to read the comments from the owners of the Touch.

After talking to the rep for 10 minutes or so about phones, he sent me to activation where they told me I had to go to a retail outlet to buy a new SIM card. I drove the family down to the T-Mobile shop and explained my situation The first thing they wanted to do was to see the iPhone in person finally. Naturally, they were impressed. They fixed me up with a new number rather quickly and we left.

I think T-Mobile is well positioned to compete in the next few years:

• According to the branch manager they are switching people over in droves because of attractive plans. That is where this branch makes most of it’s money. At the current pace, T-Mobile will be the largest provider in the U.S. in a few years. Of course, he doesn’t see how many of his customers are switching away, but still.

• They have just released a batch of new Wi-Fi enabled phones that can make calls via a wireless LAN from their cell number. This is hot. I think in a few years every phone will have Wi-Fi, and we will be using Skype (or equivalent) to make VOIP calls for free. We will only have to pay to have access to the network. Paying for minutes will be dead, just like paying for long-distance by the minute on a land-line is dead. T-Mobile is well positioned for this. (So is AT&T). This is also exciting because then cell phone manufacturers will be selling and designing for the end-user, which means they will be more like the iPhone. As Daniel Eran has pointed out, the mobile industry sells to service providers because they are the ones paying out subsidies for the phones to use them as bait for service contracts. Once Wi-Fi phones are ubiquitous, the model will change as the service providers become less important.

• The iPhone will work today on the T-Mobile network. After the 5 Year AT&T stint is up, Apple can easily add T-Mobile to the club. In fact, the guy at T-Mobile told me you can buy unlocked iPhones on eBay and use them with T-Mobile already, if you are willing to pay $700 or so. Is it a scam? Some are probably, but the fact is that T-Mobile and Cingular SIMs can work on either network. Visual voicemail is the only thing that T-Mobile would need to add to make the experience the same.