Mobile Phone companies are rated on the number of subscribers they can acquire and the revenue they can extract from customers. AT&T is ready to use the iPhone as a weapon to steal customers and achieve those goals, according to USA Today on Tuesday.

AT&T has the exclusive U.S. distribution rights for the Apple iPhone for five years, a very long time in technology years. In addition, because AT&T uses GSM and its competitors use CDMA, Apple is barred from producing a CDMA iPhone during that time.

"I’m glad we have (the iPhone) in our bag," Stan Sigman, CEO of AT&T Wireless said. "Others will try to match it, but for a period of time, they’re going to be playing catch-up."

AT&T is banking on standard techniques to compete with rivals Verizon and Sprint. AT&T has only a slight lead over those companies with 62.2 million subscribers, and is battling for every subscriber it can get. With just about everyone who wants and can afford a cell phone already owning one, growth has to come from seducing customers away from the competitors.

"Today’s market is not about finding new opportunities," Charles Golvin, a wireless industry analyst at Forrester said. "It’s about stealing somebody else’s customers."

Denny Strigl at Verizon doesn’t regret passing on the iPhone. He believes time will tell if he made the right call because he thinks his network is superior "The issue is not the Apple-ness of the iPhone itself, but with the cellular network that it is running on," Strigl said. "That will be the true test of the iPhone: What will the iPhone experience be?"

Verizon expects to have a mobile phone that can answer the iPhone in the late summer. Meanwhile, Sprint isn’t taking a back seat to any of this and is engaged in an aggressive ad campaign against AT&T specifically, deriding AT&T’s claim of "fewest dropped calls."

Whether the quality of the network on which the iPhone resides and its own design and functionality can propel AT&T into a significant advantage over the competition or whether we’re in for just another round of gimmicks and money grabs will slowly unfold over the summer and fall. However, AT&T has bet on Apple, and that has to give the competition pause.