Persistent question in the world of cell phones right now is if Apple will bring LTE support to the iPhone this year. Other 4G options such as WiMax or HSPA+ would seem off the table as LTE is the standard AT&T and Verizon, Apple’s two carriers in the United States, are working on. The problem is that it appears Apple isn’t working on any of them as of yet any way.
There are issues in bringing the super fast cellular solution to the popular iPhone, and that is the fact that the technology is still very much in its infancy. Despite the fact that 4G and LTE are the buzzwords du jour as of late in the tech industry, there is no doubt that it is still a very young technology. Verizon is hoping to have LTE in 175 markets in the United States by the end of this year, and that means “cities”, so you can pretty much forget about using this super fast technology while tooling down I-70 in the middle of Kansas.
While a lack of support is usually enough to keep a company away from adopting a technology too rapidly, in the case of LTE and Apple there is also the issue of design. As Brian Caulfield of Forbes points out, there is currently no LTE chip currently in production that has a fallback to 3G support when the 4G network in unavailable. Currently the HTC ThunderBolt is using two completely separate chips to handle LTE and 3G, and this leads to more space being needed on the interior of the phone as well as more drain on the battery. Design and battery life are two things that Apple is known to be obsessed with, so the idea of both those factors being impacted just to bring LTE to the iPhone now would definitely be unpalatable to the company.
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