Verizon CEO wants the iPhone
A syndicated newspaper report has indicated that Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg would like to have the iPhone in his arsenal and that he does not feel that it would cause any problems for his cellular network.
It should have gone without saying that that Seidenberg would be happy to sell the iPhone, but after Verizon’s recent marketing antics, wherein they first extolled the virtues of their network by saying that it would be capable of handling the traffic generated by the iPhone, followed by a series of ads in which the iPhone was vilified when compared to the Motorola Android phone that had just been added to the Verizon lineup. Now that there seems to be a chance that Apple will be making a CDMA version of their phone, Seidenberg is back to sucking up to the Cupertino handset manufacturer.
It seems clear that Verizon will say pretty much whatever it has to say in order to get its hands on more money, but there may be some actual information that came out of the statement. Verizon’s eagerness to get their hands on the iPhone, in view of the problems that AT&T has experienced with the iPhone’s bandwidth-happy users, could be interpreted in one of two ways. Either the company is foolhardy in the extreme or they genuinely feel that their network cold handle the strain of the iPhone even though AT&T’s obviously cannot. It is axiomatic to characterize a corporation such as Verizon as greedy, but entirely another to declare it foolhardy.
In this light, the AP story could be seen as doing whatever it takes to get back on the right side of Apple, at least in the eyes of the public, while at the same time marking its own ballot as a backer of its own network. Of course they would like to have the iPhone, but it is unlikely that Verizon would be willing to sabotage its own network in order to get it. One must assume that Verizon is genuinely confident that taking on the iPhone (and perhaps the iPad) will not result in any great reductions in cellular service for current customers, nor cause dissatisfaction among new customers with Apple devices. It is likely, in truth, that they both want the revenue and and are very sure they can handle the strain.
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April 9th, 2010
“Could” is misspelled as “cold.”