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Orange Loses iPhone Exclusivity in France

vic jackopson said:
Exclusive deals are anti competition and other countries should follow the good example of France and ban such deals. Shame on you Apple for screwing your customers with such deals as the O2 deal in GB.
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Hi

The UK is not France and the mobile phone industry here in the UK is one of the most competitive in the world. Put it this way there are enough mobile phones in regular use in the UK for 120% of the population.

There is no way that O2 will give up there exclusive deal with Apple without a big fight! (Unfortunately)

Alex
 
Free Market FTW.

ppnkg said:
Watch proudly as your free market economy comes down with a bang:p
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I'd like to see that. If it was actually being run as a Free Market Economy, we'd be just fine. However, instead of handling this crisis correctly, our government lost their minds because it was election time. Of course, the car mess is their fault anyway.

I'll watch proudly as a Free Marketeer as my nation enters into its socialist phase just as the rest of the world is waking up from the same nightmare, Jan. 20.
 
pyth said:
If it was actually being run as a Free Market Economy, we'd be just fine. However, instead of handling this crisis correctly, our government lost their minds because it was election time.
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I read the words, but I can't for the life of me understand what you are on about.
 
vic jackopson said:
Exclusive deals are anti competition and other countries should follow the good example of France and ban such deals. Shame on you Apple for screwing your customers with such deals as the O2 deal in GB.
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Shame on you for knowing absolutely nothing about anti-competition.

The French mobile telephone service is one of the WORST in the world --- only 3 national carriers, all 3 owned by French companies, zero foreign companies allowed in the market, all 3 French carriers were found guilty of price fixing 3 years ago....

The UK market is one of the most competitive in the world --- 5 national carriers with foreign ownership allowed. UK also has one of the BEST iphone data plans in the world.

The absolute BEST iphone deal in the world is Hong Kong --- 6 carriers in that little city.

The worst iphone deal in the world is Norway --- 2 national carriers.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

roger6106 said:
Hopefully this will make officially unlocked iPhones available in the US without a contract.
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This will never happen in the US. There are a ton of different phones that are exclusive to a carrier. This is how the market works in the US. It is not necessarily how it works elsewhere in the world.
 
Consumer choice = buy the iPhone or if you dont like the service, dont buy one.

French Consumer Choice = le whine until the government steps in to make sure no one is running too fast.

You all had a consumer choice. You all just got pissed because it wasnt the choice you wanted. When something didnt break my way my parents would have told me that's life and it happens all the time.

If a majority of consumers really did care about the ATT exclusivity then we would not have switched, would not have bought the phone and ATT and Apple would have taken a huge hit and failed. But, because of consumer choice, ATT's numbers are up, and there is a group of people that have not bought it because of ATT. Switchers > Non-switchers = Profitable!!
 
elcid said:
Consumer choice = buy the iPhone or if you dont like the service, dont buy one.

French Consumer Choice = le whine until the government steps in to make sure no one is running too fast.
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It's even worse than that.

French Consumer Choice = no etf (you have to pay out the rest of the contract), you can go to another carrier who just happens to illegally fix prices with your current carrier.

French consumers don't need the iphone to be available to all three French carriers who just happens to fix prices illegally.
 
fabian9 said:
They already sell unlocked iphones in France, UK and some other countries. But they're still restricted to the country they are bought in, probably in order to avoid people distributing them in the US and other countries.

I don't see how this ruling would change this, they'll still be sold in France and only work with french SIMs.
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I live in the Netherlands and I bought my iPhone especially in Belgium because the law says no phone can be simlocked. Bought it for € 620 (16Gb black) with no subscription at a Mobistar shop, popped in my dutch Vodafone SIM, activated it through iTunes and voila it works.

So if you want simlock free iPhones Belgium's the place to be. Italy has the same law and it sells them also simlockfree.
 
Much Ado said:
I read the words, but I can't for the life of me understand what you are on about.
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Well, it's pretty simple, if the American economy was being run as a free market economy (still with me?), we'd be okay. Instead of doing so, the people in Congress (those Senators and Representatives in DC) tried to rush through a bill that did nothing to help the economy. They just wanted to pass something so that they would get re-elected (that means that they get elected again).
 
bytethese said:
Holy crap tho, that's $820!

I think it's only $600 or $700 to buy it here unlocked with no contract.
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You actually cannot get an unlocked iPhone from any authorized retailer in the USA.

As for no-contract options, AT&T had been throwing around some press releases with hypothetical numbers like $599 for a no-contract lower-end iPhone 3G, and $699 for a no-contract higher-end iPhone 3G. Neither of those options were actually offered for sale, AT&T was basically just saying that they might consider doing it in the future.

Even if they ever are offered in the future, the phones themselves would most likely still have an AT&T-only SIM lock, even if their sale was not tied to a fixed term contract.
 
Iphone unblocked

The law in France is very clear : all carriers must offer their telephones unlocked. That is why you can LEGALLY buy an unlock iPhone in France. The price will be high though.

Another obligation to carriers is that they must unlock your telephone if you ask. And after 6 months of paid subscribtion, this unlock is free. If you check on Orange France website (http://sites.orange.fr/ge/content/pdf/v2_pdf/documentation/fiche_tarifaire_gen.pdf page 94 if you read French), you'll see that you can unlock for 100 euros before 6 months, for free after.

This is meant to be a way to protect consumers and strengthen competition.
 
elcid said:
Consumer choice = buy the iPhone or if you dont like the service, dont buy one.

French Consumer Choice = le whine until the government steps in to make sure no one is running too fast.
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By the way, there is absolutely no government intervention in this matter. It seems that Orange broke a law in some parts of their contract with Apple. That's it.

No need to be racist.

By the way, European laws very much favor competition & consumer protection. Much more than almost anywhere in the world.
 
does the French governent dictate who a company sells their product to? In the us a company is free to decide who they sell to regardless of law saying who can sell a product. This means apple could choose to sell only to orange. If not I could see them pull out.
 
marksman said:
does the French governent dictate who a company sells their product to? In the us a company is free to decide who they sell to regardless of law saying who can sell a product. This means apple could choose to sell only to orange. If not I could see them pull out.
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Hate to tell you the US government does have laws regarding how you sell products, these are classed as anti-trust laws. These are the things companys such as Microsoft have run afoul of. If you read the actual French ruling it actually is similar and has to do with the contract language, not the fact that Apple only sells to O2.
 
marksman said:
does the French governent dictate who a company sells their product to? In the us a company is free to decide who they sell to regardless of law saying who can sell a product. This means apple could choose to sell only to orange. If not I could see them pull out.
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No it doesn't, the Government still limits things, but just differently then the French.

Gun Companies can't sell guns to anyone....(for one)
 
frogleg said:
The law in France is very clear : all carriers must offer their telephones unlocked. That is why you can LEGALLY buy an unlock iPhone in France. The price will be high though.

Another obligation to carriers is that they must unlock your telephone if you ask. And after 6 months of paid subscribtion, this unlock is free. If you check on Orange France website (http://sites.orange.fr/ge/content/pdf/v2_pdf/documentation/fiche_tarifaire_gen.pdf page 94 if you read French), you'll see that you can unlock for 100 euros before 6 months, for free after.

This is meant to be a way to protect consumers and strengthen competition.
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The ONLY way to actually protect consumers and strengthen competition --- is to actually increase the number of wireless carriers in France.

France has 3 national carriers and all 3 are French owned.
 
frogleg said:
By By the way, European laws very much favor competition & consumer protection. Much more than almost anywhere in the world.
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US anti-trust laws protect actual consumers. European anti-trust laws protect European businesses.

You can just go through the 20-30 European countries that sell the iphone --- absolute useless consumer protection laws.
 
Well I am amazed and disturbed by some of the responses on this thread. First, the idea that all the French are socialist!! Where did that come from ? We're actually being run being a pretty right-wing government at the moment. Sorry but those "socialist" type comments seem pretty ignorant to me. Second, why criticize socialism anyway? I am not a socialist, (whatever that is) but to assume that it has to be bad smacks of McCarthyism to me.

Anyway, just to say that I am delighted with the decision to open the iPhone to other companies. I own a French iPhone and was pretty reluctant to get it since it meant having to subscribe to Orange, a company which I loathed. Orange was a state company before and used to abuse its position of being the only phone company in the market. Then came the competion (if limited). I was then with SFR for ten years or so. But the iPhone was so nice, and my company (American) was offering to buy the iPhone for me, and Orange (France Telecom) had improved slightly, that in the end I relented and took a one year subscription to the iPhone 3G.

Now with this decision to free up the competition more (ie. getting rid of a monopoly) I am hoping to get a better deal and actually get back to the phone company I prefer. Orange have appealed a second time (and they might win) but in the meantime both SFR and Bouygues are in negotiations with Apple and are even encouraging people to be ready for a forthcoming plan on their web sites. Most people here believe that Apple is quite happy with opening up (even if they don't admit it in public). People don't like to be forced to change phone company just because they choose a different phone and I am quite sure that Apple have lost sales because of it.
 
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