“There’s been a lot of fuss and bother at Apple’s decision not to include LTE support in its fifth-generation iPhone 4S, but the anxiety is misplaced as it really is not the cat-bird-seat time for the tech,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“There’s some perfectly reasonable reasons 4G/LTE support in this generation iPhone didn’t yet make sense: For example, LTE is not fully deployed, there are some technology and battery life challenges,” Evans explains. “I spoke with telecoms expert, Vanilla Plus editor, George Malim, who confirmed the fragmented nature of international LTE deployment: ‘Europe is fragmented because of licensing. The UK for example won’t even be making LTE licenses available until next year. Almost without exception, operators will adopt LTE but we’re not there yet. Device availability is a major issue holding back LTE uptake. It’s mostly confined to dongles at the moment. LTE is in deployment in the US, notably with Sprint but the others are rolling it out. There’s probably more deployments in APAC (Asia-Pacific) as a region than any other. In Russia the four major operators are rolling out a shared LTE network – which will be ready next year.'”
Evans writes, “If Apple had included LTE support within the iPhone 4S, then it is likely the product would be more expensive (additional components) with lower battery life (the drain of managing 2G, 3G and 4G network coverage on the chip) — all to support a standard the vast majority of Apple’s customers won’t actually be able to use.”
Read more in the full article here.