Data Plan, eh?

AT&T published their iPhone 3G landing page today. For the most part, it doesn’t say much that we didn’t already know. However, there are two lines that bother me a bit:

• Add a Consumer Data Plan for iPhone 3G to a qualified voice plan for $30 per month.
• Add an Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone 3G to a qualified voice plan for $45 per month.

This “Consumer” plan appears to be the BlackBerry Personal plan for $30 per month while the “Enterprise” plan appears to be their Blackberry plan for $45 per month.

This begs the question though, what will the Enterprise plan do for an iPhone 3G that the Consumer data plan won’t? Is it just for AT&T’s bottom line such that if a company is purchasing iPhones to deploy to their employees they have to pay the extra $15 per month per device or is it something more? Through several Twitter conversations, I’d heard suggestions that it’s effectively just marketing and the big corporations will shell out for the Enterprise plan, while others suggested that the Enterprise plan will enable the use of the Exchange features (push email, contacts, calendars).

I’m a little nervous that AT&T is actually going to cripple the iPhone on some level to dis-allow subscribers of the consumer plan from utilizing in the enterprise level functionality, hence MobileMe being “like Exchange for the rest of us”. I’m even more nervous that Apple will let AT&T cripple the iPhone which, for the first time, had features that just worked.

On the flip-side, however, is the fact that it’s not the device but the firmware that enables these enterprise features. And that firmware can be installed on the original iPhone with the original data plan. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, but I’m starting to have a feeling like I’m NOT going to be in line on July 11. DAMMIT!

UPDATE: After poking around some more on Apple and AT&T’s sites, I came across the disclaimer at the bottom of Apple’s iPhone 3G Enterprise page:

Enterprise Rate Plans
Apple and AT&T pair the best phone for business with the largest digital wireless voice and data network in the nation. Enterprise Data Plans for iPhone include Visual Voicemail, unlimited data (within the U.S.), and your choice of SMS text message plans. Browse the Internet and send as many email messages as you want — without additional fees.

That sounds conspicuously like what one would expect with the Consumer data plan.

• Written on June 12, 2008
• Filed under Apple