AT&T Sees iPad As Mostly A WiFi Device, Despite the 3G iPad

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AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson spoke at an investor conference and made some interesting comments regarding Apple’s products. While he sees the iPhone as an important part in AT&T’s lineup, he imagines that the iPad will be mainly a “WiFi driven product”. AT&T is, of course, providing the 3G service contract for the 3G-enabled WiFi.

When Stephenson was asked about the iPad, he said he didn’t think it would bring in a lot of new 3G subscriptions as he feels that people would mostly use in with WiFi. Despite this (or perhaps in light of this), the iPad will offer a month-by-month 3G subscription service from AT&T. This is pretty rare from a North American telcom, who typically lock customers into two-year service agreements with locked, subsidized phones.

This is (sort of) in direct conflict to comments from the head of Dell’s Mini program, Neeraj Choubey, who said last week that AT&T loves the idea of tablets using 3G because they can now sell two or more 3G connections per customer. Following that Choubey said that Dell was in talks to get bundled 3G on the Dell Mini 5 and other tablet phones from the computer maker.

AT&T exclusivity contract for the iPhone in the United States has been huge for the oft-lampooned telcom. When Stephenon was asked about the length of the exclusivity deal with Apple, Stephenson declined to answer directly but said that he saw the iPhone as “an important part” of AT&T’s phone offerings “for quite some period of time”.

When asked about bandwidth demands on AT&T’s 3G networks in iPhone-heavy areas like New York City and San Francisco, Stephenson said that they were improving their networks to account for high smartphone data usage.