Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt D
No supposedly about it.
The iPhone 5 supports LTE bands 1, 3 and 5.
EE will be using band 3 (1800MHz). Three will eventually be able to use it, as it bought some of EE's spectrum, but not until September 2013.
The bands being auctioned by Ofcom for LTE are not 1, 3, or 5. No matter what O2 and the rest end up with, the iPhone 5's LTE won't support it.
If/when Ofcom ever allows band 1 (2.1GHz) to be re-farmed for LTE we'll probably be on the iPhone 7S... by then there'd hopefully be wider LTE support anyway!
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Not entirely true. O2 and Vodafone also own 1800Mhz (band 3) spectrum and could use it for LTE if they wanted to, same goes for 2.1Ghz (band 1). It took barely a year for the 900/1800 LTE refarming to get approved, I suspect any attempt to get 2.1Ghz approved will be even faster given that every network owns spectrum in the band.
As for the phone itself, there are already variants that support LTE on bands 4, 9, 13, 17, and 15, and in the US it's pretty much standard for manufacturers to make phones specifically tailored to each individual provider's frequencies - nothing to stop them doing that in Europe as well.
But in any case none of this is going to be happening particularly soon.