Optus are reporting an 11% rise in subscribers with an additional 213,000 customers. Apparently this is largely due to the iphone. While there’s no doubt that the iphone has been a huge success in this country the figures just don’t add up.

Australia already has over 100% penetration of mobile phones. It seems highly unlikely that quarter on quarter growth of 11% (which would be almost 50% annually or over a million new subscribers) would be possible. Especially when main rival Vodafone has reported modest growth and Telstra’s mobile revenues are up.  These subscribers have to come from somewhere and it looks like Optus may be making them out of thin air.

If Optus held exclusive rights to the iphone and offered some very good reasons to switch then you probably could expect sales figures for the iphone to be somewhere around the 200k mark per quarter but Optus neither hold exclusive rights or have compelling price plans.

Take a close look at the wording of the article by the AAP and you’ll see where the real boost came from:

The telco’s parent, SingTel, which reports its first-quarter financial results today, said 213,000 new mobile and wireless broadband customers signed onto Optus in the June quarter, including 139,000 post-paid customers.

The key word is wireless broadband. Netbooks are the latest cash cow for Optus who sell them on contracts with no upfront costs in a similar method to the way mobiles are sold.  In fact all the telcos are discovering a major source of new subscribers to 3G and that is not people using phones but people who want wireless Internet wherever they are.

So, it looks like the iphone has been used as a nice gimmick to sell a lot less interesting statistic.

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