There have been lots of articles recently about the iPhone and AT&T – each tackling an individual aspect of the relationship between the carrier and the hardware vendor. But I wanted to take a step back and look at the AT&T/Apple relationship as a whole, and answer a fundamental question: overall, has the iPhone been good or bad for AT&T?

(Warning – this is going to be a long post – skip to the bottom if you just want to read the conclusions!)

Note: I wrote this post on the evening of 22 July, whereas AT&T’s Q2 numbers were released the morning of the 23rd. A quick look through the Q2 numbers reinforces several of the points made here and doesn’t appear to contradict anything significantly. It appears the iPhone dragged down AT&T’s OIBDA margin by a couple of points – less than last time around, although that reflects the timing of the two launches in the quarters they impacted most strongly.

First, the good stuff

Let’s start with the positive aspects of the iPhone for AT&T. The obvious thing to look at is the impact on customer additions, and since very few (if any) mobile subscribers will choose an iPhone as their first device, the key metric to look at is customer wins from other carriers. Here’s a Morgan Stanley chart from late 2007 – based on their extensive surveys (all the usual caveats apply, but this is a really decent sample size and illustrates what I believe to be real trends):

(click to see a larger version)

They key message here is that after the launch of the iPhone AT&T gained positive ‘flow share’ against Verizon for the first time in the history of their survey – that is, more customers switched from Verizon to AT&T than the other way around. AT&T also gained subscribers from Sprint, but lost them to T-Mobile, which had a very good quarter too.

Morgan Stanley also asked survey respondents what they had been before they were AT&T iPhone customers:

Given that this was the end of Q3 and the iPhone launched just before the end of Q2 2007, one third were already iPhone customers. Another third were existing AT&T customers, and the last third were new to AT&T – so these represented switchers from other carriers, and 12% of AT&T gross adds in the quarter. That’s not an enormous proportion of the total, but it’s certainly a measurable impact.

Of course, we all know that subsequent years / versions have seen much larger numbers of iPhone purchases, and so the effect has been greater. The same Morgan Stanley survey repeated at the end of Q1 had different results – in part because of the much larger installed base (70% of the total), but also seeing a much higher share of gross adds coming from the iPhone:

In both Q4 of 2008 and Q1 of 2009, around a third of AT&T’s total gross adds came from the iPhone, which has clearly become a very important source of wins from other carriers to AT&T. It probably has a little over 8 million iPhone customers on its books at this point.

So that’s gross adds and wins from other customers. Secondly, there’s service revenues. iPhone customers have to sign up for not only a voice plan but also a hefty data plan. Some may sign up for text messaging or additional voice minutes on top of the minimum, but the very least a standalone iPhone customer will pay per month is $70. That’s already quite a bit higher than AT&T’s average ARPU at around $50, and AT&T’s management has stated that it sees ARPU of around 1.6 times higher on average for iPhone customers compared with its other postpaid customers. That’s a major boost to AT&T as well.

Thirdly, there’s the issue of a ‘halo effect’ from the iPhone onto the rest of AT&T’s business, the most prominent symptom of which is foot traffic to AT&T stores. It has stated that it saw significant increases in foot traffic from prior levels once the iPhone launched, and there are undoubtedly customers and potential customers who came in to look at the iPhone and ended up buying something else (something cheaper, in all likelihood!). That’s really hard to quantify, but I don’t doubt that there’s a positive effect there. In addition, AT&T’s exclusive on the iPhone creates a perception of AT&T as a purveyor of cool devices.

To sum up on the good stuff: the iPhone has been a significant source of gross adds and has had a positive impact on flow share, it brings subscribers to AT&T who have a significantly higher ARPU than its other customers, and the device has a halo effect that’s difficult to quantify but no doubt useful as a third source of benefit to AT&T from the arrangement.

Now, the bad stuff

So what about the bad stuff? This falls into several major categories:

• Subsidies and hefty cost of acquisition
• Impact on the network
• Ceding control to Apple
• Being cast as the evil gatekeeper
• Over-reliance on one device.

First, subsidies. This is a murky area but a simple comparison of the subsidised price and the non-subsidised price suggests a $200 subsidy for the 16GB version and a $300 subsidy for the 32GB version. That gels with information various people seem to have pieced together from Apple’s earnings data which suggests Apple gets around $300 from AT&T for every device sold on top of what the customer pays. That’s a hefty subsidy indeed, compared with the $150 subsidy that appears to be AT&T’s standard for other ‘PDAs and smartphones’ and $50 to $100 for cheaper phones. And it basically means AT&T is $300 in the hole from the get-go, and has to put a lot of that high ARPU into paying off that deficit, rather more so than for other devices. Divide that $300 by 24 months (the standard contract length) and you get $12.50 per month of that high ARPU that’s just paying off the device. If AT&T keeps up its current policy of letting higher-ARPU customers get a new subsidised phone every year, that rises to $25 per month. Compare that with around $6 for one of the other high end phones, which basically have the same voice plans and similarly-priced data plans (though not all will take them). That’s the most quantifiable negative impact of the iPhone on AT&T’s business – it amounted to 10 cents of EPS dilution in Q3 2008, for example. The other negatives are less easily quantifiable, but I’d argue they’re at least as important.

Secondly, the impact on the network. This one has been bubbling to the surface recently and I think it’s really significant. A good illustration is a recent PC World 3G network test. In its big analyst event in 2007 and again at subsequent events, AT&T has boasted about its spectrum depth – see this excerpt from a March 2008 presentation, for example:

It specifically states that its advanced spectrum position is a major advantage over competitors because of the superior performance with high network load and better coverage and quality it allows. But that PC World test put AT&T bottom by a long way out of the big three US carriers in reliability and throughput. Its reliability in several major markets was just 60% and in one – Orlando – it was just 52%, where reliability is defined as “the percentage of tests for a given city in which we could detect a signal, connect at a reasonable speed (faster than dial-up), and sustain an uninterrupted connection for the duration of a 1-minute streaming test”. That’s terrible! And it’s significantly worse than either of its two major competitors. Sprint, of course, has a network with plenty of capacity since it upgraded and lost a bunch of customers, while Verizon seems to have managed to keep its network investment running ahead of customer needs. (Sprint marginally edged Verizon in the tests on reliability but it was a close run thing.)

Why is AT&T’s network performing so poorly when its spectrum position was supposed to be such an advantage? Well, one reason could be the iPhone itself. There are various data points here, but among them are the following:

• Google stated in February 2008 that it was seeing 50 times more searches from iPhones than any other device
• AdMob figures from earlier this year suggest that in April the iPhone generated 43 percent of mobile Web requests and 65 percent of HTML usage.
• Net Applications reported a 0.09% browser marketshare for the iPhone Safari browser in December 2007 – already two times greater than all Windows Mobile devices put together.

It’s clear that the iPhone has a tendency to generate significantly more data usage than other devices, and this seems an entirely plausible explanation for the poor performance of AT&T’s 3G network, both in these tests and in real-world experience (as anyone who’s visited the new Yankee Stadium with an AT&T device knows, it’s virtually impossible to get a reliable connection in there despite strong signal strength – this year’s SXSW is another prominent example of the impact iPhones can have on a network.) If the iPhone really is having that serious a negative impact on AT&T’s network, it will obviously affect the iPhone customers themselves but also anyone else trying to use an AT&T device (including laptop modems) to access high-bandwidth applications, including video, file downloads and so on.

I’m going to wrap the next two bullets into one paragraph here because they’re two sides of the same coin. The perfect illustration here is the Apple WWDC keynote in May: when MMS and tethering were announced to applause, in each case when the presenter indicated that AT&T support would not come until later in the year there was a smattering of laughter (see the two relevant clips here). That was a fairly benign response, but on Twitter (just try this search – even weeks after the announcement) and elsewhere it’s been much more vituperative. iPhone users are ticked at AT&T for not supporting these features and they’re not afraid to say so. It’s a significant negative brand association for AT&T, and one it hasn’t really dealt with well. But at the root of the problem is the fact that AT&T has ceded control to the device vendor (Apple) in the way it never has for any other device. With any other device, AT&T would carefully control the release and announcement of features, but here Apple is making announcements to the whole world simultaneously and AT&T is singled out as one of the few carriers not supporting these new features. AT&T cannot prevent Apple from announcing these features and it cannot stop the egg from landing on its face when it’s not ready to support them. The degree of control ceded to Apple has put AT&T at a significant disadvantage and it has ended up becoming the ‘evil gatekeeper‘ in iPhone customers’ minds.

Lastly, AT&T’s over-reliance on a single device. Earlier, I quoted Morgan Stanley survey data to suggest that the iPhone drives around a third of AT&T’s gross adds, and that number is probably higher in quarters when new iPhone versions launch. That’s great as a driver of switching from other carriers and gross adds, which is fine for now. But it also means AT&T is heavily reliant on the device, and the risk is that it will eventually lose exclusivity over the device. It’s probably fair to say that the iPhone itself is the most significant driver for customers switching to AT&T and the iPhone, rather than anything about AT&T. Therefore, if the iPhone were available on their existing network, there would be no reason to switch. And there goes a third of AT&T’s gross adds, at least in theory. Meanwhile, that short-term impact on flow share seems to have been a bit of a flash in the pan – here’s a more recent version of that Morgan Stanley chart:

The negative Verizon flow share trend has reversed, and the AT&T trend really isn’t one at all – its numbers are bumping around around zero. Verizon seems to have recovered very quickly from the original iPhone launch (and whatever broader issues were plaguing in previous quarters) and has seen only minor blips from the subsequent launch of the iPhone 3G. So, yes, AT&T continues to gain subscribers from Sprint and T-Mobile, but against its strongest competitor it is doing worse than it was when the iPhone first launched. What if Verizon gets the iPhone? Almost all the negatives still apply but one of the largest positives goes away.

In summary

So, to summarize:

There are three major positives associated with the iPhone for AT&T:

• Subscriber additions
• Higher ARPU
• The ‘halo effect’

Conversely, there are several negatives:

• High device subsidies
• Negative network impacts
• Ceding control and brand management to Apple
• Over-reliance on a single device.

The challenge in coming to an overall conclusion here is that not all these benefits and disadvantages are quantifiable – there’s no single yardstick by which we can measure them all. But it’s clear that, along with the positive impacts of the iPhone on AT&T there are several negatives, and they’re getting worse. At this point, even those subscriber additions are merely keeping AT&T on par with its competitors rather than allowing it to gain significant ground. Meanwhile, its network is being trashed, it has heavy device subsidies to deal with, and it has gained a reputation as the ball and chain holding back the iPhone from reaching its full potential. At present, the pros and cons are at best 50/50, but should AT&T lose exclusivity the balance would definitely shift towards the whole iPhone experiment having been a negative one for AT&T. After all, exclusivity was the “quo” in the quid pro quo that the AT&T/Apple deal represented. When that ends, the benefits to AT&T largely do as well.

Some have leapt to AT&T’s defence in recent days (see this example) but the approach here seems misguided. It’s not as if anyone forced the iPhone on AT&T. In fact, we’ve known from the beginning that it was offered to Verizon first but it turned Apple down. The reason? “We just couldn’t reach a deal that was mutually beneficial” according to Verizon’s spokesman. And that sums up the problem perfectly: the iPhone had the potential to be mutually beneficial for both parties if the right deal was struck. But whereas Verizon didn’t see what Apple proposed as mutually beneficial, AT&T apparently did, or was keen enough on the idea to strike a deal that wasn’t as balanced as it might have liked. But although Verizon was roundly pilloried at the time for passing on the hottest device of the decade, it’s starting to look like a smart move at this point.

What are your views?

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