US Cellular: We’ll take the iPhone when Apple gives us LTE

It’s a common misconception that Apple is picking winners and losers among the wireless operators by bestowing or withholding the iPhone, but U.S. Cellular and its parent company TDS prove otherwise.

TDS CEO Ted Carlson told attendees of a UBS analyst conference that U.S. Cellular is waiting for Apple to offer a more “cutting edge” iPhone before U.S. Cellular would be willing to take the risk of selling it. By cutting edge, U.S. Cellular means LTE. In November, U.S. Cellular revealed that Apple had offered it the CDMA variant of the iPhone, but it declined, saying it couldn’t make the economics work. That makes a lot of sense in this case: selling the iPhone requires enormous upfront subsidies from wireless operators, leading U.S. Cellular to question the model’s profitability. In addition, the smartphone takes a tremendous toll on operators’ data networks. Other regional operators like C Spire have risen to the challenge, but C Spire doesn’t have what U.S. Cellular has: a big, dense, data-hungry market like Chicago.