IPhone 4 may not support 4G LTE (opens in new tab)

(online.wsj.com)

2 pointssprovoost14y ago3 comments

3 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

sprovoostOP14y ago· 2 in thread

Regardless of whether it's true if the next iPhone has 4G, who cares? They quote spotty coverage and battery issues as a reason. But if I were Apple I would most certainly not support it for a very different reason: why offer a product that can eat your data bundle in two minutes? The real bottleneck in almost every country in the world is the high price per gigabyte. That price will go down eventually, but not by a lot in the life time of that phone (3 years tops). There's a few factors that determine price:

A physical / technological limits, such as 3G / 4G masts

B number of masts

C number of customers

Even in a perfect market B can't keep up with C until the market is a bit more saturated with smartphones. But in many countries, including the US, phone companies have nasty monopolies and other incentives to not hurry up with building capacity.

So let's stop the hype over 4G and focus on reaching $1 / gigabyte and decent bandwidth during rush hours first.

throwaway3214y ago

Not every country is the USA, many (most?) European countries have no issue with 4g coverage at sane speeds and data caps. If the new iPhone has 4g, the providers will be under that much more pressure to deliver, crippling your product because providers are greedy and slow to roll out is stupid.

sprovoostOP14y ago

I'm not from the USA, but agree the situation here is probably one of the worst in the world. However I've been to several countries in the past year and the best deals tend to be around 300 MB - 1 GB for anywhere between $10 and $30 a month sim-only. Assuming most people don't want to spend more than $40 / month on their data, that means 4G speed will eat your monthly allowance in minutes.

Also, in some European countries, like The Netherlands, Telco's are actually increasing the cost per gigabyte, blocking Skype and other competitors and reintroducing data caps. They lost a lot of money in the past few years and are trying to recover from that.

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