T-mobile lawsuit has iPhone implications
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 15, 2007 at 1:57pm
The practice of locking cell phones to a specific carrier is heading for court in the US. The California Supreme Court has given the go-ahead to a lawsuit that targets T-Mobile for the practice, after the company had tried to get the suit dismissed, reports ars technica.
The class action lawsuit, filed by Bruce Gatton and Christina Nguyen, also addresses the carrier’s required early termination fees. If they succeed in court, the decision could carry some ramifications not just within California, but throughout the rest of the country. Perhaps more importantly to many Apple fans, it could also affect the iPhone, ars technica notes. if the case goes in favor of the plaintiffs, carriers in the US—or at least in California—will likely be forced to offer to unlock all handsets sold to the public and drop early contract termination fees, the article adds.
Meanwhile, a CNET analysis by Don Reisinger says that, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray, Apple will lose some revenue sharing from AT&T as people continue to unlock iPhones. But according to the analyst, the amount lost will not have much of an impact on Apple’s bottom line. The analyst explained that the actual amount of revenue lost from iPhone unlocking is (at most) 10 percent.
“Based upon my calculations, it would actually behoove Apple to allow users to unlock iPhones.,” Reisinger says. “The reason is simple: the incremental gain in profit from the sale of unlocked iPhones is actually higher than the incremental loss in quarterly AT&T revenue as long as the company sells roughly 5,000 unlocked iPhones in the September 2007 quarter.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
