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thouts

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 2, 2008
143
0
What are peoples thoughts on the iPhone eventually being available to more service providers? I only ask because AT&T Service is sub par in my area. Currently i'm with alltel. Anyone have any input on this...is it at all a possibility or are we stuck with at&t forever?
 

superstrikertwo

macrumors 65816
Jun 9, 2008
1,094
100
California
What are peoples thoughts on the iPhone eventually being available to more service providers? I only ask because AT&T Service is sub par in my area. Currently i'm with alltel. Anyone have any input on this...is it at all a possibility or are we stuck with at&t forever?

AT&T and Apple have signed a contract where in the US AT&T is the only person who can sell the iPhone. The contract expires in 5 (now 4) years.
 

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Also read the tons of other threads regarding the compatibility issues. Alltel is CDMA, is it not? As of course are Sprint and Verizon. So even unlocked, neither first nor second generation iPhone will ever work with those networks. The first gen iPhone is essentially completely compatible with T-Mobile, but the second gen iPhone cannot use the T-Mobile USA 3G network. So really, even if it were unlocked, it wouldn't help you much. As for whether Apple will actually actively court multiple carriers (e.g. in the US, by releasing a CDMA iPhone and/or releasing a 3G that works on the band that T-Mobile uses), ... as said above, it's almost certainly not happening soon.
 

fishkorp

macrumors 68030
Apr 10, 2006
2,536
650
Ellicott City, MD
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A347 Safari/525.20)

Altell was bought by Verizon. Both use CDMA and Apple would need to make an entirely new phone for it to work, current iPhone is GSM.
 
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