AT&T, Apple differ on the iPhone gap

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A Little Context..: With over 60M subscribers, and an average cell phone buyer buying about every 18 Months, AT&T has to be delivering and activating on average nearly 800,000 cell phones a week before the iPhone. In other words, probably 75% of the phones AT&T activated in the last week of June were RAZRs and Nokias and Samsungs, not iPhones. That's far more interesting story - why in the face of the iPhone media blitz upwards of a million people didn't buy, each for their own reasons.

Also, adding another couple hundred thousand (plus or minus 50,000) phones is going to be an big extra load on their activation systems. That they did as well as has been reported is a good thing, and probably represents a lot of hard IT work behind the scenes to get ready. Another good story. Nevertheless some people, especially those keeping their existing numbers, may have been delayed waiting for Verizon (who is notriously slow) and Sprint to release the old number to AT&T. A third story.

Finally, The Apple store sales would also have been delayed until too late for AT&T to report as activations for the quarter. It has been reported that 40% of the iPhone sales were customers from other carriers, mostly Verizon, that makes about 100,000 local number portability activations that would account for a big chunk of the discrepancy. Sold and activated in cell phones is the same difference as sold and worn in clothing.; Posted by: panzrwagn@... Posted on: 07/26/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use