One happy side-effect (for Jobs) of Apple not running a network was that AT&T got the blame when there were bandwidth issues due to heavy demand for data, not Apple. ("I love my iPhone, but that damn AT&T network.....")
I originaly thought the iphone would be an iChat client running only on data via a network. With facetime and iMessage it looks like that's the way things are heading...<p>Wireless networks are essentially ISPs.