Telephones are a licensed market in most places and those licenses often sell for silly numbers – telephone numbers, even. They’re difficult for most new cooperatives to afford today, what with co-operative finance usually being a bit more limited than what public companies can get by betting their company and its pension fund.

So, my phone co-op (thephone.coop) buys UK mobile phone services from one of the five UK mobile licensees. It’s only relatively recently been able to shop around for fixed phone service supply, instead of having to buy from the British Telecom privatised monopoly. It doesn’t give any revolutionary deals, but I think it has been useful in pressuring the regulators and politicians to open up services to competition.

Still, it gives better service than I’ve had from any other phone company.

Please let everyone know! Hopefully an alternative will be more receptive to new technology and won’t charge as much as it does for the iPhone’s basic functions.

At the very least, it’ll send pressure to Telstra, Vodafone, etc. to lower their prices.

I mean come on, look at your weather compared to the UK! ;-)

Free iPhone for me on an upgrade and only £45 per month for UNLIMITED data! Woot!

On a serious note, there seems to be some HUGE discrepancy between all the countries in regards to plans, but not surprising. For once, the UK is pretty good value.

rippoff springs to mind ;)

I have an 80 GB video iPod that is full of music, videos, and audio books for the bus commute to and from work.

My video iPod also doubles as a backup hard drive when I need to transfer larges file between home and work.

Read my 6 reasons for NOT buying one:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/6-reasons-i-am-not-buying-the-new-iphone-3g/

1) Make a good product
2) Let a telco set the pricing

Telstra, as with their NextG launch, have decided to price the iPhone into obscurity. I don’t know who makes these decisions over at Telstra HQ, but they are either very stupid or very very stupid. People would snap up the iPhone if it was more like $80/mth for “practically all you can eat calls” and 1Gb of data.

Its a shame the other two can’t match the 3G coverage because their pricing is a bit more reasonable (in fact Optus seems pretty good to me).

The other thing is that no matter how great the iPhone is, it’s not worth a bad plan *or* bad customer service. So show them. Don’t buy the iPhone. Let the lemmings discover what you already know: the plan is bad and the service is bad.

Open platform phones (Java and Maemo) seem to have better blog clients anyway.

But now that they have let go of the iPhone and let the carriers handle it (who SUCK at customer service), the iPhone becomes just another fancy phone. Especially outside the U.S., it looks like. Big issue, since there are other phone manu’s who make iPhone-similar phones now.

Let’s see what this means for Apple & the iPhone.

~ Elizabeth

I do feel for those particularly in Canada and Australia that are getting raw data deals. I don’t think the telcos get it. Unlimited data (with fair use, of course) is fairly common in the UK now.

Time will tell whether O2 start capping heavy online users, and by how much, but effectively a few GB per month should be fine.

We sit in South Africa with only one service provider (Vodacom) for the iPhone at this stage. They also haven’t given any indication of the costs yet (the phone is apparently going to be available around the end of this month) but going by past experience, only the top end of the market will be able to afford one. Data is hellish expensive across all networks here and network coverage is pretty pathetic compared to your “first world” countries.

And, apart from the fact that we don’t have access to the iTunes store here in SA, the GPS navigation capabilities of the phone are looking even less desirable (3G iPhone GPS Navigation in South Africa – Gimmick or Godsend?).

So, what exactly would we be buying this phone for again? Ah yes, for making calls… But aren’t there other phones available that can do this too? ;-)

Yes, it’s called economies of scale and a market that can support it. It’s also called good customer service. Something which many countries lack, including Australia’s “fit in and shut up or piss off” customer service policies. For all it’s failings, the US has great customer service, always going the extra mile because they understand the value of a long term customer. Hence, all you can eat, hence, unlimited minutes, hence, free refills.

God bless the USA! =)

BTW, what mobile broadband are you using to get unlimited data? All of seen is Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and they only go up to 2Gig… Maybe it’s not the service you’re talking about.

The carriers have apple exactly where they like to have all smart phone providers. Expensive handsets subsidised up front and locked in for long contracts. The real money they will make is during the contract when you go over the bandwidth and minutes.

I’m locked into another contract for a while anyway, but I hope the plans change substantially between now and when I can pickup an iPhone.