Apple’s iPhone may sell like hotcakes when it becomes available in June, but consumers who aren’t in territory served by AT&T’s Cingular Wireless could find the phones useless.
Cingular is the only wireless service that will work with the iPhone. A coverage map on Cingular’s website shows service in the Denver metro area and around Grand Junction.
But broad swaths of the western part of the state are shown as having no coverage. In eastern Colorado, the map indicates that service is provided by a partner company through roaming agreements and not by Cingular itself.
Customers in parts of Alaska, the Dakotas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, upstate New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming could face similar problems.
“No wireless service operates in every single square foot of the U.S.,” said Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel. “In many places where we might not have coverage we do have roaming agreements so your device would work there.”
Cingular customers can roam on other networks or other carriers, but new customers must live in communities the company serves.
The phones will only be sold at corporate stores owned by either Apple or Cingular.
Residents in smaller towns like Durango will have to travel to Colorado Springs or other larger communities to get their iPhones, said Sam Hotchkiss, who is in sales at Connecting Point of Durango, which specializes in Apple products.
The iPhone was unveiled earlier this month during the annual Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. The device is a cross between another of Apple’s industry-changing devices, the iPod, and a cell phone.
The device combines an iPod music player, cell phone and full-featured Internet browser.
Cingular has roaming agreements in Durango, so residents could use the phones, Hotchkiss said. But the signal might not be strong enough to guarantee the Internet browser would work, he added.
Staff writer Kristi Arellano and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at (303)954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
