“The fourth quarter could be a bonanza for the wireless industry, combining the usual holiday craziness with the traditional third-quarter new-iPhone bump,” Kevin Fitchard reports for GigaOM. “UBS predicts a whopping 11.7 million iPhone activations between Verizon, AT&T and Sprint in the final three months of the year. That will result in 1.3 million total postpaid adds for national operators, up from 1 million in last year’s fourth quarter, UBS projects.”
“A lot of those customers will go to Verizon and Sprint – as the iPhone newbies – but UBS thinks the big winner will be AT&T. It will have the only ‘free’ iPhone as the 3GS will be entirely subsidized with a two-year contract,” Fitchard reports. “UBS also believes that AT&T’s network will actually work for it rather than against it. The iPhone 4S has a 14.4 Mbps high-speed packet access (HSPA) chip tailor-made for AT&T’s network, compared to the slower CDMA EV-DO chips used to access Sprint’s and Verizon’s 3G networks.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]