Europe used to dominate mobile in every area: speedy networks, slick handsets and cutting-edge applications. No more. As a graduate student in the United Kingdom in 2006, I marveled at how advanced Europe was. My friends had all dumped their landlines and were fully mobile, flaunting their sleek Nokia candy bar phones while I languished in a tethered existence to my home phone.
But this week while traveling in Turkey and France, it became painfully obvious that Europe now lags the U.S. in mobile, in networks, handsets and just about anything else you can imagine.
What happened?
The iPhone Shifts The Industry Toward Cupertino
About the time I was writing my Masters thesis on the decline of American hegemony, a new hegemon was rising in Cupertino, California. In early 2007 Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. The mobile industry would never be the same.
The iPhone was initially locked to AT&T, with international markets not open to the iPhone in 2008. This gave the U.S. pole position on experimenting with calling plans and networks to support the popular smartphone. In particular, U.S. data plans that offered unlimited data trounced European plans that metered data.
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