“Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities is out with what he refers to as ‘part two’ of his analysis into Apple’s work on creating a 5G iPhone and what the near future holds,” Chance Miller reports for 9to5Mac. “This investors note says that Apple may adopt faster antenna modules in all of its 2018 iPhones, and offers more information about suppliers for next year’s iPhone antenna modules.”
“Kuo explains that antenna design is a key factor in the ‘anticipated boost to LTE transmission speed’ coming with the 2018 iPhone lineup,” Miller reports. “He says the new iPhones introduced next year will be capable of supporting 4×4 MIMO standards, allowing for improved speeds for users.”
“While Apple is also working on 5G support for future iPhones,” Miller reports, “these are nice advancements that should work to hold users over until the true next-generation of mobile broadband is available.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Improved speed is always welcome!
SEE ALSO:
Intel working with Apple to bring super-fast 5G to future iPhones – November 17, 2017
There goes your data! Here comes you monthly $500 bill!
Don’t worry about that at all.
The purpose of the highest data rate LTE-A implementations is not to get you to use more data. It’s to get you onto and off from the network as fast as possible. The shorter time each individual user spends using the tower the more users the cell companies can get onto their networks without overloading them.
For you, it might even mean longer battery life. If you’re using some even data hungry app as your using cell data services, you may spend a few milliseconds downloading a burst of data rather than several tenths of a second downloading data. Your modem and radio frequency equipment in your phone can go back to sleep sooner. Your phone does lots of very short bursts rather than lots of much longer bursts.
In the larger picture, there are areas of the U.S. where the current cell structure routinely gets overloaded. If each users goes to higher data rates and thus shorter bursts, then that opens up effective bandwidth for more concurrent users.
I wish financial analysts would stick to what they know or at the very least consult with technology experts before they make idiotic statements. Kuo is one of the best at predicting Apple’s future, and he gets things wrong less often than most. However, he needs to stay out of the technology end or get help.
The move to the full LTE-A has much less to do with a modified antenna than it does a shift in the chips implementing the full LTE-A modulation/demodulation suite and the RF equipment within the phone that can properly handle the very high modulation rates and still maintain the bandwidth restrictions per channel, the non linear AM-AM and AM-PM interactions, and the spurious noise suppression required for this advanced waveform. Third order and even fifth order stuff becomes a pain at this point. Yes, the antenna is an integral part, but it is not by any stretch of the imagination THE critical part.
MIMO supporting antennas have been around for some time. Even MIMO supporting beam forming antennas have been around for some time. It’s not a trivial thing to do, but it’s not rocket science or a research project either. Creating such antennas for an iPhone is an engineering project. Plus, with the very nice RF chambers that Apple has at its research facilities this should be a straightforward process.
The highest data rate LTE-A implementations are a pain to implement in the modem and in the RF equipment in the phone. That’s why there are extremely few full blown implementations out there. It’s why “5G” won’t be pervasive for a few more years. (I’m predicting “5G” will be the commonly implemented standard by about 2022.)
From the very beginning years ago, the ITU basis for the “4G” label was the ability to do up through 1 Gbps for a single user. LTE came out and started calling itself 4G. It didn’t meet the ITU standard to be called 4G, but people called it 4G anyway. Then the ITU backed off on their requirement for 1 Gbps. Finally the LTE-A (Long Term Evolution-Advanced) was adopted, and its highest data rates could reach the original 4G requirement of 1 Gbps.
As I mentioned, there are a lot of critical pieces that must work together to do the highest rates of LTE-A. The antenna is one part, but not THE critical part.
(And, a lot of analysts forget that all the cell towers need to be updated to the full LTE-A suite of waveforms too. The vast majority of them support a subset of LTE-A so the cell companies can claim they support LTE-A, but extremely few support the full LTE-A suite.)
Ming-Chi Kuo: Apple’s next-gen iPhones will feature gigabit LTE technology
…And no mobile services in the USA will offer it until 2021, and that’s optimistic.
…Still waiting for any service to offer LTE Advanced in my area, aka REAL 4G. It’s only been a published standard since 2013.
(Cheap, lazy, greedy, abusive, stupid, money-grubbing, oligarchic, crap US mobile phone services). 💩💸💩💸
Derek, could you please comment more clearly on American cell companies? Thank you.
Within the context of this article and thread, (IOW, avoiding lecture mode), I can point out that AFAIK only Verizon has experimented with providing LTE Advanced (REAL 4G). They have been providing it in the Chicago area. I don’t know if they’ve started providing it elsewhere. No other US mobile phone service provides it anywhere in the USA. (I’d very much enjoy being proven wrong).
The simplest source of information about REAL 4G and the progress of the as-yet-unfinished 5G standard is Wikipedia. Here are the links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G