That doesnt work. If you were already under contract with ANY network, the terms would state any upgrade whilst still under contract (which v1 owners will be) that you'll add the new contract to the old.

If O2 are willing to waiver this fact, then it proves how desperate they are to get custom - knowing many wont want one with better phones about to launch.

Desperate maybe but it might be that O2 make more money that way? Either way the info i have tells me its a new contract which i know is correct.

There are just a thousand other details that i want to know but they havent been finalised yet lol

O2 is Telefonica isn't it? I wonder how Spanish businesses are doing nowadays :rubchin:

they don't have the iPhone in Spain, so they wont have anyone with time left on a pre-3G iPhone contract so to Telefonica it'll be just the same as any other subsidised mobile phone?

Let me help you. cheapest contract for a "free" phone is £45pm. 18 month contract.

So it's £810. That's a lot of money for a "won't cost you a penny" phone

The phone isn't the only thing you are paying for, you presumably get plenty of minutes, texts and data for your £45ppm (Think you get free Wif-Fi at certian locations also)

I still don't get it how people can be so gullible these days.

It's like saying "here's a free 5 bedroom house. You move in today without spending a penny. Then you're legally tied into paying £10,000 every month for the next 500 years"

Come on

Buying a house is a lot like buying a phone.

Move in for free or a smallish deposit.

Use of it 24 Hours a day (500 minute contract)

Three toilets to choose from (250 texts)

Garage (50mb of data)

After 35 years the house is yours to keep (after 18 months the phone is yours to keep)

You're getting a bit tied up in the theory that you are just buying something like an MP3 player or some mud flaps, there's also a service behind the product that keeps it working and is a benefit to you. Maybe the house analogy was a bad one

The phone isn't the only thing you are paying for, you presumably get plenty of minutes, texts and data for your £45ppm (Think you get free Wif-Fi at certian locations also)

£45 pm

1,200 minutes

500 texts

"line rental" (remember the days when you didn't get any calls for your monthly fee, plus BT still charge £11 pm for landline rental which pressumably costs virtually nil in ongoing costs and infrastructure, whereas 3G network must still be ammortising and the power bills for active RF cell transmission must be far higher than passive copper cable)

9,500 Wi-Fi hotspots from our partners The Cloud and BT Openzone

(don't forget "private" wi-fi is free aswell, whether it be your home network, the one in Starbucks or stolen randomly as you walk down the street from unsecure base-stations)

Having said that, I'd rather carry on paying for my phone upfront (£99) on the £35 pm tariff

£35 pm

600 minutes (+ as I am already an O2 customer I get an additional 30 mins offpeak and 20 mins peak extra = 650 total)

500 texts

So , as I don't use all my minutes anyway, the extra 600 minutes and "free" phone would cost me £80 extra (18mo x £10 - £99) on the £45 tariff.

"line rental" (remember the days when you didn't get any calls for your monthly fee, plus BT still charge £11 pm for landline rental which pressumably costs virtually nil in ongoing costs and infrastructure,

What about running all the exchanges, employing the engineers to fix faults, running new lines to new homes, replacing old/broken lines etc etc etc ?

What about running all the exchanges, employing the engineers to fix faults, running new lines to new homes, replacing old/broken lines etc etc etc ?

I would have though mobile phone networks need exchanges (interfaces), engineers, fault fixing as well.

If you run a line to a new home that is a cost that is associated with the aqusition of a specific new customer. If the customer doesn't pay an install fee (as irrelevant to overall cost as that may be) then the telecomms company assigns it to aquistions. A new mobile mast has no direct "customer" or cost centre.

In fact for years, the 3G owners had a piece of paper that they had each paid £4 to 5 BILLION for, for the privilege of using the airwaves, before even a single mast or customer existed. Only now is 3G really starting to be used. These licences from 2000 only last 20 years!

This does not compare to a nationwide infrastructure that the tax payer paid for (as GPO)and BT used for effectively free for decades, just covering maintenance costs. It is true that over the years the line rental was used to pay for upgraded exchanges and optical networks, but alot was profit.

You only have to look at NTL/Virgin to see how much it eally costs to cable a country (last mile/local loop unbundling excepted).

It is the way that costs are structured that shows 3G "ongoing" ammortised costs are significantly higher.

beg to differ but it takes this off topic.....

When the first 3g cells were going in the estimated cost of the basestaion was £250,000. This excludes, civils, the mast, links, ground rent etc.

Steve

The BT Network is currently being upgraded, so i'm guessing they are putting that line rental to some good use at the minute!

BT's 21st century network