
C Spire—the nations largest private cell phone carrier—will be carrying the iPhone 4S “in the coming weeks” according to their website.
Poor T-Mobile.
C Spire is a regional carrier that operates a CDMA network à la Verizon and Sprint in Mississippi, the Florida Panhandle, Parts of Alabama, and the Memphis metropolitan area. They have approximately 900,000 customers, a paltry number when compared to T-Mobile’s 33 million plus customer base.
The news is a gut-check to T-Mobile—who has been open to carrying the iPhone— especially now that they're the only major carrier in the United States without the iPhone. The reasons though most likely revolve around the wireless technology used to power T-Mobile’s 3G network. C Spire’s CDMA network shares the same 3G technology as Verizon and Sprint, whereas T-Mobile’s GSM 3G network differs from AT&T’s. So much so, that unlocked iPhones can only operate using T-Mobiles 2G frequencies.
Still, the fact T-Mobile has been left in the cold without an official iPhone on its network for this long doesn't bode well for the carrier or Apple for that matter. For a long time it was been assumed T-Mobile would eventually get the iPhone, and those assumptions were even greater when AT&T started the proposed acquisition of the company, but with the DOJ and FCC preventing the acquisition the future of the iPhone on T-Mobile is now in question more than ever.
Source: C Spire
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