Family and Child, health and pharmacy

Vodafone Balks at T-Mobile iPhone Deal (NewsFactor)

Vodafone's German unit is behind the action. The company petitioned the court to block sales of the iPhone in Germany until its complaints about an exclusive agreement between Apple and T-Mobile are addressed. "We're not taking any plans to replicate these actions anywhere else, or in the UK," a Vodafone spokesperson was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying. "It's a different regulatory environment. We believe it's more to do with a breach of local German laws." Vodafone vs. T-Mobile The court order does not demand T-Mobile stop selling the iPhones altogether, but does, at least temporarily, prohibit the company from selling them with a two-year contract. The court has mandated that the product be allowed to function on other carriers' networks. Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile Deutschland, could not be reached for comment, but in a published statement early Tuesday, T-Mobile Deutschland said that it reserves the right to claim damages from Vodafone, which operates the second-largest wireless network in Germany. T-Mobile, with 34 million customers, is the largest there. Although no one has been willing to go on the record to discuss what the exclusive arrangements are, said Avi Greengart, a wireless analyst at Current Analysis, Apple has a revenue-sharing arrangement with its iPhone carriers in the U.S. and in Europe. "I've seen lots of financial analysts coming up with numbers that they clearly developed using a calculator, a napkin, a pen — and a lot of imagination," Greengart quipped, alluding to the speculation surrounding AT&T's five-year exclusive deal with Apple to sell the iPhone. Revenue Sharing Greengart said he figures the world will know sooner or later the extent of the revenue-sharing agreements because Apple is a public company. Apple might not break out the service agreement revenues specifically, he said, but financial analysts can look into the numbers to get a fairly close estimate. "If the service revenues becomes really healthy, Apple will probably want to break that out as well," Greengart said. "Apple still won't tell us, for a lot of good reasons, what specific deals they made with specific carriers. But if it becomes material, they will want to disclose some numbers around what they are generating separately between services and hardware." In the U.S., handset makers need to work with wireless carriers to get broad distribution. But in Europe that's not the case. Phones are typically unlocked. If not for service revenues, Greengart said, it would make much more sense to release the phones as broadly as possible in Europe and Asia. "Apple is going operator by operator in Europe, which means the company is clearly tying a service fee to that," Greengart said. "CEOs of some of the operators have said that publicly; they just won't say how much."