Absolutely everybody wants a Verizon iPhone

When you start doing the math, it is pretty clear that everybody, his brother, and their milkman wants an iPhone on the Verizon network. Why this has not happened yet is a mystery bigger than Judge Crater.

Study after study comes up with information that points to people wanting an iPhone and people wanting to be on the Verizon network, not to mention all of the people that clearly want the combination of an iPhone on the Verizon network. There is a survey, with analysis, saying that 51 percent of the subscribers on the Verizon network want an iPhone. Then there is another survey that says that 34 percent of AT&T’s iPhone users want to be on the Verizon network instead. When you start adding up the numbers, that’s a lot of people that want to have a Verizon iPhone.

Reports say that AT&T has 15 million iPhone subscribers, a considerable number. If a third of them are waiting to get a new iPhone, that’s a quick 5 million customers right there. And if 51 percent of Verizon’s 90 million subscribers actually want an iPhone but can’t get one because they don’t want to move to AT&T, that’s another 46 million potential new iPhone users. That totals 51 million potential iPhone sales that are just waiting in the wings when it is possible to get an iPhone that works on the Verizon network, which is a number that just about totals all of the iPhones that have been sold to date.

Surely these numbers are overblown to some degree because actually doing something like changing carriers or buying a new phone is more difficult than just saying you want to. Still, it does give one an idea about how much pent-up demand there is for something that is already selling like gold-plated hotcakes. If the combination of iPhone and Verizon had existed when the first Apple handset was introduced, how many million more iPhones would already be in use in the U.S.? Once the iPhone is available on Verizon, will anyone really want an Android phone, or a Blackberry? Rhetorical questions, perhaps, but the possibilities boggle the mind.

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