Apple And AT&T’s Relationship Just A Meaningless Tie

Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, we have heard several rumors about Apple working with Verizon to bring the iPhone to their network. It seems that some of the speculations may have actually had a grain of truth to them. Wired recently looked into the complexity of Apple's relationship with AT&T over the years and the reason the partnership continued thus far despite the many problems between the two.

Fred Vogelstein from Wired says that one of the earliest instances the relationship between Apple and AT&T fell short was with Cupertino's use of Infineon as the supplier for cellular communication hardware. Vogelstein pointed out that Infineon's technology is better suited to the European market where cellular towers are located closer to one another. Apple reported to have declined the request by AT&T insisting on working with Apple to make the hardware from Infineon work better on their network, saying things such as "No, you resolve them. They're not our problem. They're your problem."

The report further mentioned that officials from AT&T visited Apple a number of times to try and convince the company to make a trade-off between user experience and call-quality but Apple officials ended up firmly standing their ground on these requests. Vogelstein noted the following:

It(Apple) wasn’t interested in cooperating, especially if it meant hobbling what had quickly become its marquee product. For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.

Wired also mentioned that Steve Jobs suggested several times that Apple must terminate its partnership with AT&T in favor of another carrier. The report pointed out that Apple engineers made several visits to Qualcomm headquarters to study the possibility of switching to Verizon's network and what doing so would entail. Vogelstein mentioned the following regarding this issue:

Apple also heavily considered switching to Verizon numerous times. Around the end of 2007, at Jobs' behest, Apple engineers (including Scott Forstall) visited the headquarters of Qualcomm - the primary supplier of the chips in Verizon's phones. It concluded that switching to Verizon would be too complicated and expensive because the chips were different sizes and would necessitate rebuilding the iPhone from scratch. Apple also wasn't convinced that Verizon's network would fare much better and let's not forget the nasty lawsuit that voiding its exclusive pact with AT&T would invite.

Mainly an extremely high cost of transition to the Verizon network has been the primary reason behind Apple's decision to stick with the AT&T network thus far as noted by Wired. However the company continued to work with Qualcomm on possible other solutions to the issue. Recent rumors have been suggesting that Qualcomm could be working on a hybrid chip that will allow the iPhone to run on both CDMA and UMTS networks and it turns out these rumors are true.

Verizon is currently making the transition to the LTE network that is expected to become available next year. Currently, AT&T has also hinted on the imminent end to carrier exclusivity by announced the revised Early Termination Fee (ETF) chargers and advancing the upgrade eligibility for many of their customers for the iPhone 4. Between these events and the fact that there is a court case regarding AT&T and Apple's partnership with the iPhone we believe that speculations that Apple would offer the iPhone to Verizon as early as next year may turn out to be true. What do you think of the whole ordeal? Do you prefer the iPhone be on a network such as Verizon instead of AT&T? Share your thoughts in the comments below. If you are interested in reading the Wired article, click here.