The higher regional court of Hamburg (Hamburger Oberlandesgericht) yesterday ruled in favor of T-Mobile. Sipgate is not allowed to promote or distribute its iPhone application that allowed Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony on jailbroken iPhones anymore.
The issue is not the application, but installing Sipgates VoIP client required to jailbreak the iPhone. And jailbreaking of T-Mobile’s customer’s iPhones is illegal in germany. By the way: jailbreaking of iPhones bought abroad is not.
Vodafone yesterday announced to offer a data-plan for customers who actually bought an unlocked iPhone in a foreign country. The data-plan requires a normal fon-plan by vodafone, means: the iPhone plan is an upgrade. The interesting point is the price.
This flatrate costs 9,95€/month surcharge to a current fon-plan. It gets slowed down from HDSPA to EDGE/GPRS speeds after having transmitted 500MBytes.
In contrast to original T-Mobile Germany iPhone plans Vodafone does not permit using Voice-Over-IP (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM) or VPN – means they tolerate that you even jailbreak your iPhone in order to install third party apps, that are not provided through the official Apple AppStore.
The struggle for the cheapest iPhone plan has begun.
It is rumored in german media, that T-Mobile is about to bar Sipgate’s application, that allows the iPhone to use Sipgate’s Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) services. T-Mobile argues Sipgate’s makes use of unfair business practices (like requiring to jailbreak in order to install Sipgate’s client) to pull customers from T-Mobile to Sipgate.