Verizon is hosting a Jan. 11 event in New York City, where many in the industry believe Verizon will unveil plans for bringing the iPhone onto its network.
Verizon is circulating invitations to a Jan. 11 event in New
York City, sparking rampant speculation that the
carrier intends to announce that it will carry Apple's iPhone.
According
to the bright red invite, the event will take place at 11 a.m. EST at Frederick P. Rose Hall at Lincoln
Center, with Verizon President and COO
Lowell McAdam serving as host. Aside from that, precious little information is offered.
That
hasn't stopped the rumor mill from kicking into high gear. Reports have
circulated for months that Apple intends to release the iPhone on Verizon in
early 2011. An October article in
The
Wall Street Journal, quoting people "briefed by Apple,"
suggested that Apple had slated a late-2010 production start for iPhones
capable of running on the carrier's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) network.
That came after sources told the blog TechCrunch in August that Apple had
ordered millions of Qualcomm CDMA chipsets for the upcoming smartphone.
Other
publications carried the story, including
Fortune and
The New York
Times. In each case, unnamed sources were cited for the information.
In
addition, a number of prominent analysts have already begun incorporating a
Verizon iPhone into their 2011 models for Apple. "Our model assumes
Verizon launches the iPhone in early- or mid-[2011]," Piper Jaffray
analyst Gene Munster wrote in a mid-December analysis. "While we do not
know the timing of the launch, we have modeled it to occur midway through the
Mar-11 quarter."
Over
the summer, Barclays Capital analyst James Ratcliffe suggested that a Verizon
iPhone wouldn't necessarily cannibalize existing customers from AT&T, which
at least for the moment holds an exclusive lock on the device in the United
States.
The
"iPhone would be a plus for Verizon, but not a seismic industry change,
given the relative stickiness of smartphone customers," he wrote in a June
22 research note. "[The] primary source of Verizon iPhone [subscribers]
would be pent-up demand by existing Verizon [subscribers]." An iPhone
release would raise Verizon's net subscriber base by 900,000 in 2011, he added,
while between 500,000 and 1 million AT&T customers would switch to the
rival carrier.
In
the past week, the drum roll for the Verizon iPhone's appearance has only
accelerated. "Apple's introduction of an iPhone for use on Verizon's
network will come sometime after the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas in early January,"
read
a Dec. 29 report by Bloomberg Businessweek, citing "a person
familiar with Apple's plans who is not authorized to discuss them publicly."
That article also suggested the unveiling event would be appropriately "splashy."
Email
Print
