There must be something Steve Jobs wanted really badly from Cingular to sign an exclusivity deal of that length. We know that Cingular had to adapt their mail system. In the telecommunication world, five years is an eternity. The market is evolving so rapidly that no one can tell what the market will be like in such a long time. If Steve Jobs goes back five years ago, could he have predicted what the iPod would be today? Probably not.
There must be a lot of sacrifices or investment done by Cingular to implement the iPhone. This could mean excellent news to Cingular customers but not for international iPhone fans. The U.S. customers will probably be the first ones to have new types of features from the Cingular network and they are having them now. But on the other hand, if the iPhone cost so much to implement in a cellular network, worldwide deployment may take a lot more time than what we expected.
During the exclusivity, Apple is also barred for that time from developing a version of the iPhone for CDMA wireless networks. That ban is no small thing. AT&T rivals Verizon Wireless and Sprint are both CDMA shops. AT&T uses GSM, a global standard incompatible with CDMA.
Source: USAToday
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