actually, apple commands the telco industry because of its stranglehold of mass market (aka sc ). case in point, when iphone was released, it started the "data revolution" in mobile. ATT needs to upgrade its backbone just to cope up with the big data traffic. when iphone4 came out, telcos upgraded their network to hspa+. and then lte for iphone4s. samsung has introduced hspa+ and lte in their devices ahead of apple but it deemed useless since the telcos didn't react

telcos adopt to what apple is doing and plans on doing. and that's the key advantage of apple