Verizon, 4G and iPhones

cgriffin21 writes "Verizon plans to launch its 4G LTE network in 38 major U.S. metropolitan areas by year's end, in an ambitious rollout that will also drape high-speed mobile broadband coverage over 60 airports." Not coincidentally, everyone and their brother is talking about iPhone on Verizon in 2011, and what that means to Android.

Comments

Re:It means nothing to Android.

[Andy Dodd]

While the CPU in the iPhone is an "Apple spec" CPU, most likely the radio chipset is from a third party.

Most such third parties offer roughly equivalent GSM and CDMA chipsets (In fact, probably 50%+ of the GSM/UMTS smartphone market is powered by Qualcomm chipsets, despite Qualcomm being the creator and backer of cdmaOne/CDMA2000), making it not too difficult to make a CDMA version of a phone and a GSM version.

Also, you show a fundamental lack of understanding of RF and communications engineering. New band = new antenna. Same bands but different protocol = no new antenna, just a different baseband processor. Therefore, adding T-Mobile's additional band is the least likely route for Apple to go.

Changing the iPhone from GSM/UMTS to CDMA2000 (note: UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme, one of the reasons Qualcomm is involved in that market despite them backing a competing protocol/air interface suite - they're good at making CDMA chipsets whether it is the UMTS protocol/air interface suite or CDMA2000) most likely entails:
1) Switch out the baseband processor chip. Note that as I said before, nearly all UMTS chipset providers also provide CDMA2000 chipsets that are very similar and require little engineering
2) Remove the now unneeded SIM slot (what was that about a packed device?)

That's about it

Note: Right now, Apple gets their radio chipsets from Infineon, but there is a lot of evidence pointing to them moving to Qualcomm for the 5th gen iPhone, with the ability to produce a CDMA version being one of a number of reasons, Infineon getting purchased by Intel being a bigger reason - see http://touchreviews.net/iphone-5-qualcomm-radio-chip/ - I don't know about Infineon chipsets, but it is VERY easy to make both a CDMA2000 and GSM/UMTS version of a phone if you use Qualcomm for your radio chipsets, which is why a large portion of HTC's GSM product line have near identical CDMA equivalents.