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Analysis Yesterday Apple announced that O2 would have the exclusive rights to their iPhone in the UK, with punters paying £279 for the phone and signing up to an 18-month contract.

But how much is O2 paying for its five-year exclusive, and can it really make any money out of it?

AT&T pays $3 a month when one of its customers takes up an iPhone, but $11 a month when someone switches, so a similar arrangement would be unsurprising for O2.

O2's ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is around £23, so 10 per cent of that would be £2.30 while 40 per cent comes to £9.20 - not incomparable with what AT&T is paying, if a little higher. Still, that would be in keeping with the "high cost of doing business here", as Mr. Jobs put it when justifying the price of the handset.

It also matches nicely the additional cost of the £35 a month iPhone tariff, as reader Dan put it:

But 200 minutes and 200 texts usually cost £25 a month on O2...

Seems like the end user is paying the 40 per cent revenue that goes to Apple.

Of course the un-metered data tariff will affect ARPU, especially as O2 expects the majority of access to come from Wi-Fi hotspots where fair-use capping is unlikely.

Around 30 per cent of O2's ARPU comes from data, but only 2.6 per cent of that is data as we would understand it - the rest is SMS traffic which is unlikely to change significantly for iPhone users (though the inability to send to multiple recipients, or type messages one-handed, might reduce traffic). So O2 stands to lose at least 60 pence in data charges per month, per iPhone user.

The iPhone doesn't support MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), but O2 users only send an average of half a message a month, so assuming the iPhone user would also have received half an MMS per month, that's another 45 pence off the ARPU.

The real money-spinners in mobile data come from games, ringtones and graphics which users download and pay for on their mobile bill, but the iPhone won't support any of those. While O2 is expected to share its call revenue with Apple, you won't find O2 pocketing a percentage of the iTunes take.

As reader Andrew Fenton puts it:

So that's 279, then [£]35*18 [months], for a total of over 900 quid.

For that you could get yourself a Nokia N95 on a 12 month Flext35 contract, with double the included minutes, and unlimited 1.4mbit 3.5G.

What's more, you'd still have enough left to buy an 8GB iPod Nano. And an entire PC.

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