

IPhone 4 may not support 4G LTE - sprovoost
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110802-710714.html

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sprovoost
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.

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throwaway32
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.

~~~
sprovoost
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.

