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The iPhone partnership between Apple and AT&T has sparked a federal inquiry into exclusive partnerships between carriers and mobile device
manufacturers. Public interest groups argue and rural carriers say the exclusive alliances are anti-competitive, while the big carriers say such arrangements foster innovations and keep hardware prices low. In this analysis, Pike & Fischer concludes that wireless carriers and handset manufacturers need to prepare for a market environment that--at the very
least--limits exclusive handset agreements. Reliance on hardware as a primary differentiating factor within a service- and content-driven industry weakens a competitive platform over time. This report provides in-depth analysis of the handset exclusivity debate and our predictions and recommendations on carrier-manufacturer partnerships.
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- TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Executive Summary
- Carrier-Manufacturer Partnerships
- AT&T and Apple
- Sprint Nextel and Palm
- Verizon and Research In Motion
- The Arguments for Handset Exclusivity
- The Arguments Against Handset Exclusivity
- The Regulatory Environment
- Conclusions and Recommendations
- Outlook
- Recommendations
- TABLE OF FIGURES
- Figure 1: Leading U.S. Wireless Carriers and Popular Exclusive Handsets
- Figure 2: AT&T Mobile Revenues
- Figure 3: AT&T iPhone Customers
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Tim Deal
Tim Deal serves as our Senior Analyst, with a special focus on broadband-enabled consumer electronics devices and on emerging mass market applications such as online video sharing and VoIP-optimized e-commerce. Tim has developed SWOT analyses on such products as the iPhone, the Apple TV service, and rich-media applications on such social networking sites as MySpace. Tim has been providing detailed and actionable competitive intelligence analysis to leading technology firms for more than seven years. In that time he has authored more than one hundred comprehensive syndicated reports and an equal number of custom financial models covering the computing, consumer electronics, digital media, and storage industries. Prior to his career in competitive intelligence, Tim served as a counterintelligence/human intelligence and force protection analyst with the United States Army. Tim lives in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire. Contact Tim at tdeal@pf.com.
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