“When Steve Perlman looks at the latest iPhones, he doesn’t see the newfangled 3D Touch interface. He sees the fine print that lists all the wireless spectra these phones can talk to,” Cade Metz reports for Wired. “The list is long, and it includes Band 39, the spectrum used by the unusually powerful wireless network Perlman and his company, Artemis Research, are building in the San Francisco Bay Area. The new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are built to run on practically any network in the world, he says, and this means consumers soon will have the freedom to move between wireless carriers as they please.”
“‘The thing that people may or may not notice is that if you build a phone that supports every band in the world,’ he says of Apple and the new iPhones, ‘you make it easy for for people to migrate from operator to operator,'” Metz reports. “A few obstacles still stand in the way to this new wireless order, but they’re gradually falling away. Amid all the hullabaloo at its product extravaganza in San Francisco last week, Apple announced that it will finance phone purchases, letting you pay for hardware with monthly installments without the help of a carrier like Verizon or AT&T.”
“The rub is that switching carriers in this way often requires a new SIM card, that thumbnail-size wafer that slips into the back of your phone. But this will soon change too,” Metz reports. “Apple already offers a multi-carrier SIM in the iPad, the ‘Apple SIM’ — a SIM that lets you change carriers without any hardware changes. You simply tap the change into your touchscreen. Eventually, this kind of SIM will come to the iPhone as well. There’s no good reason it wouldn’t.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bring on the final piece, the Apple SIM, in iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus!
SEE ALSO:
Apple SIM iPads change the international data roaming game – July 1, 2015
New ‘Apple SIM’ could significantly disrupt the wireless industry – October 17, 2014
Apple SIM card in new iPads challenges mobile networks – October 17, 2014