Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer
Adding to that, how long will it be before Apple is rolling out their own cellular networks, now that they own a huge chunk of the technology to do so?
5 years? 10?
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There’s a pretty big leap between controlling their own silicon in their consumer devices and rolling out their own cellular network. Cell networks are expensive, even by Apple standards. There are companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on spectrum and have just sat on that and haven’t rolled out their networks, because the spectrum is the
cheap part.
Apple doesn’t always reinvent the wheel. Apple Card, for example, uses MasterCard’s payment network, and Apple Pay works with established interbank networks. They didn’t develop their own payment network for Apple Card and Apple Pay, even though it would be a source of interchange fees long-term, because that would be hugely expensive and would limit adoption. Apple Pay sits on top of the standard interbank payment networks. Controlling the interchange isn’t required for Apple to add value; the user experience of Apple Pay is where they add value.
I could
maybe see Apple introducing a “mobile made simple” MVNO, Google Fi-style, but even that would put them in competition with the current carrier partners they aren’t leasing network capacity from.
I think things would have to get pretty dire for Apple to consider launching a cellular network to be worth it.
Right now the US government is trying* to incentivize Dish into finally launching a network, so that the US will still have four networks after they approve the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. But even after the government-brokered spinoff of Boost and spectrum and other assets to Dish, there’s no guarantee Dish will actually follow through on building the network. Dish is a network services company with a current delivery mechanism that is becoming more obsolete by the day, and even
they have had trouble making the math work on a cellular network for years. It’s just really, really expensive. And in Apple’s case, that’s not where Apple adds value, anyway.
I don’t think Apple is going to think it makes sense any time soon.
*) Allegedly. If they wanted to preserve four networks, they could just…not approve the merger.