I had to ring Optus regarding a new phone for an employee of ours, and on ending that discussion I asked the rep if he had heard of the iPhone.

His voice changed from the normal salesman type tone to one of excitement and said "YES".

I then mentioned to him that my boss and myself want to get one when they are released, and his answer was......."That will be no problem, we should be able to work something out"

Now, he either knows somthing about Optus and Apple teaming up or he knows nothing on how it will be sold.

I'll leave you all to make up your own minds.

I'd say he's just a very enthusiastic salesman who just wants to make the customer happy.

I thought there was some technological reason why Telstra had the inside running for the iPhone? NextG?

Hope the Optus story is correct. I'd rather not have to change my broadband and home phone from Optus to Telstra so that I can get the best deal on the iPhone.

Telstra is the only provider of the EDGE network, which the iPhone uses for internet connectivity (correct me if I'm wrong here guys). But it's a 2.5G standard, whereas in Europe, and Australia now, 3G is all the rage, so it is sort of expected that the iPhone will have 3G components by the time it hit here early next year.

From memory, the reason that everyone thought Telstra would get the iPhone, is that the iPhone supports EDGE (GSM), and Telstra is the only network that supports that. But the fact that a 3G version is coming out totally nulls that....

EDIT: Beaten!

Nope...the 1st Gen iPhone is GSM only, the lingua franca for Mobiles in Australia

Whilst Telstra may have the inside running from the point of view of network compatibility, I have read commentary that suggests they are not interested due to their 'competing' digital music service.

Personally I think Telstra is grossly overstating their position if they think they have any kind of competitor for iTunes.

Telstra's position (as per usual) is thus

"I think people overreacted to it - there was not a lot of tremendously new stuff if you think about it," said Greg Winn to AAP

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/...405361731.html

Yeah that makes sense. Telstra don't seem to like competition one bit(obviously) so it wouldnt surprise me if they ignore the iPhone for that reason

Guys
My uncle works for red rock ok which is a sub contractor of optus, he works on the network and is involved with technologies such as sms and mms, red rock was the company that allowed sms and mms to be sent to any network (in the olden days it was same network only). any how he is in pre mode for vvm and push email and other features coming from optus so yes telstra is bagging the iphone out because it is losing the race for it. Optus is at this stage the number one carrier or ther big nine
cheers
darksplat

so this guy is definitely working on visual voice mail for optus - exclusively?

Him and a team of 3 others

I presume Apple holds the patent for visual voicemail...?

interesting... that does add further explanation as to Telstra's ramming of the iPhone. They don't like losing much to Optus.

Dont forget Optus is owned by Singtel, and mobiles in Singapore is big business, so hopefully that could have some sway over here in AUS..