Everyone is waiting for 7th August to come around hoping that it will bring the announcement of the iPhone 5. However this could be just on the carriers AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.
T-Mobile iPhone 6 not 5?
T-Mobile are the 4th largest carrier in the US and they might stick with the Deutche Telekom AG parent company sales agreement that they have with Apple to get the iPhone by 2012 in the US. This is according to Craig Moffett of Sanford C Bernstein.
It seems likely that they will reach an agreement for T-Mobile to start selling the iPhone in the US by 2013, the analyst said in a research note. They have been struggling to keep their customers and during Q1 they lost more than 688,000 customers. Not surprisingly half of the handsets sold by rivals AT&T and Verizon during Q1 were iPhones.
It is thought that if T-Mobile sold iPhones they would be less likely to lose customers and this could help Deutsche Telekom US to achieve net revenue growth sooner than is expected. Apple have always made agreements with carriers for country specific iPhones including Sprint Nextel’s $15.5 billion deal for the iPhone in 2011 which relies on Sprint selling around 30 million handsets.
This year Apple have included other carriers outside of the top four, these include Leap Wireless along with Sprints Virgin Mobile USA. These are both offering prepaid iPhone plans.
At the moment there has been no comment from anyone at Apple or T-Mobile USA about an iPhone next year i.e. iPhone 6, but it may mean that Apple are wanting new revenue streams to help feed the growth of the iPhone. It could mean that they would be willing to reduce the commitment they require if sales seem to be cooling off.
T-Mobile could be faced with a problem if they went for the iPhone 5 in that they would be in the last place among the four major carriers within the US with their LTE network and it has been suggested that the new iPhone 5 will have support for 4G LTE. So it looks like we may be stuck waiting for the iPhone 6 before T-Mobile is officially in the ring.
