Unlocked iPhone Prices in Europe
After German phone carrier T-Mobile has recently started selling the unlocked iPhone for the ridiculous price of 999 Euros, now also Orange in France published their price for the unlocked version of the Apple cellphone: 749 Euros. Luckily for Germans, the EU is a customs union, so they can pretty easily order it in France and have it shipped to Germany — even the higher shipping won’t make up for the 250 Euro difference.
I also hope that the court which ordered T-Mobile to sell the phone unlocked (still a temporary injuction, IIRC) will follow up and make them sell it for a realistic price eventually. Right now, my guess is that the hefty price tag can not be considered effectively complying with the court order. Yet, even with the current price, some competitors start taking advantage of the situation: T-Mobile competitor Debitel (well, sort-of-competitors, they are resellers for carriers such as, you guessed it, T-Mobile) started handing out a 600 Euro signup rebate for people buying the iPhone over at T-Mobile and subsequently getting a contract at Debitel. Interesting.
On other news, German grocery store chains are still selling the (aging but still pretty good) Motorola RAZR for little more than 100 Euros, unlocked and without a contract.
(Image CC by-nc-nd licensed by Graft Flo on flickr).
I can’t say that I’m especially comfortable with the prospect of a court forcing a non-monopoly player to lower their prices, and though I haven’t read the details of the ruling I would be surprised if it were “you must make this phone universally available” rather than “the purchaser of this device must not be restricted in their use of it by provider locks”. And I’m quite the Euroskeptic on such issues!
Yeah, I can see that. I actually agree with you. It’s not about making a single phone universally available and affordable to people. Instead it’s about limiting customer choice. However, as a general rule, it is possible, while formally complying with such a customer protection ruling, to effectively still restrict the customers’ choice by making the price of the alternative prohibitively high.
An example would be former public telephone system monopolist Deutsche Telekom (incidentally T-Mobile’s parent), who have to offer access to their phone network to all of their competitors by law. If the prices for that weren’t subject to review, they would just charge 5 Euros per minute and customer, making any competition unaffordable. And if that was the case there is no doubt we would still be writing official administrative requests today in order to get assigned a phone number by the federal postal service here in Germany. (And this is indeed an achievement of the European Union, though I am skeptically looking at many things they do also).
T-Mobile is not a monopolist, but one of four companies in an oligopoly. Therefore their power to force customers into unwanted, long-term company affiliation should be limited. This, however, does not only apply to them, but to Vodafone (the claimant in this case), O2 and E-Plus just as well.
Yeah, I’m sympathetic to the price-discouragement, though without visibility into what the costs to T-Mobile are for the device it’s hard to say to what extent locked phones are simply being discounted against the expected revenue from the long-term customer commitment. Given that there is room in the market (a unified one in this case; my strong dollar grits its teeth at the shenanigans required to get things from the plump, juicy retail outlets of my southern neighbour) for a 25% price difference, I don’t think there’s much of a case for legal intervention.
We have similar issues with former-monopoly telcos having to share their once-protected infrastructure with service-level competitors on a “fair” basis here in Canada, especially around DSL and cell networks, and they’re only slightly improving over time. (Though I hear hopeful things on at least the cell-tower front.)
True, good point. If you are able to get the phone for 750 Euros from across the border, the customers will certainly do so if they care about the price difference.
Thanks also for the insight into the Canadian telco market. Interesting to see how other countries handle that.
I would just wait for their upgrade for the 4G which is coming before christmas…
it’s in TEST with the Singapore Authorities for the CDMA,TMDA, 2.1,2.4,2.5,5.4,5.6Ghz bands trials ..which coincidently the iPhone has issues with the WiFi not working well, so they are working to kill that issue with a WiFi MAX capability too!
Watch for the hardware upgrade.
Best regards
Azrin @ http://www.azrin.net
PS: it was supposed to have GPS built in too.. I think with the 3.2Ghz receivers built in.
cool cool