In a note to investors, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu said his checks with Apple suppliers and others suggest AT&T Inc. will lose its exclusive place as the iPhone carrier no later than the first half of next year.
"The iPhone will be available on other cell phone networks as early as this fall and will likely come first to T-Mobile USA," Wu said on June 10th in an advisory to investors.
The reason that T-Mobile makes sense is because once AT&T adopted the GSM (global system for mobile communications)/GPRS (general packet radio service) platform, when it implemented its third-generation wireless standard known as W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access) or UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) it then conformed to the rest of the world.
With few exceptions, carriers in Europe and Asia have chosen to operate on the GSM standard, with an eye towards upgrading to W-CDMA. It was already possible for AT&T Wireless to upgrade to W-CDMA from TDMA, but the decision to deploy GSM hastened that migration.
In the US the major wireless carriers like Sprint and Verizon Wireless use a different wireless standard, so converting the iPhone to run on their networks would presumably involve more technical hurdles. But T-Mobile uses the GSM standard and is thus a likely candidate because its wireless technology is similar to AT&T's.
Wu said T-Mobile also sees the iPhone as key to winning back lost customers, meaning the company will be more likely to settle for Apple's terms.
In any case, it seems logical that Apple needs to sign up another U.S. carrier to keep up the pace of iPhone sales and counter the rising competition of phones that run on Google Inc.'s Android software.
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