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.
The iPhone has an exclusive contract with Cingular for wireless service. Like other wireless companies, there are areas where Cingular has no coverage and some that require a roaming charge.
A map on Cingular’s website shows heavy coverage in the Denver metro area and around Grand Junction.
But 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.
“No wireless service operates in every single square foot of the U.S.,” said Mark Siegel, Cingular spokesman. “In many places where we might not have coverage, we do have roaming agreements so your device would work there.”
Cingular is the nation’s largest wireless carrier, with 58 million customers. AT&T this week began rebranding Cingular following its acquisition of BellSouth, which owned the other half of Cingular.
The iPhones, priced at $499 or $599 depending on gigabytes of storage, will be sold only through Apple or Cingular.
The iPhone was unveiled 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 cellphone.
The device combines an iPod music player, a cellphone and a full-featured Internet browser.
Cingular has roaming agreements in Durango, so residents could use the phones, said Sam Hotchkiss, who is in sales at Connecting Point of Durango, which specializes in Apple products. But the signal might not be strong enough to guarantee the Internet browser would work, he added.
The iPhone service reportedly won’t be available in all – or portions – of Alaska, Colorado, the Dakotas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, upstate New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
