Thread by @jhamby

Minor correction in the second half, as I tweeted earlier, the iPhone 8 may be limited on the 4x4 MIMO antennas due to the patent feud…

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…and also Apple wants to dual-source their radios regardless of the patent feud, and Intel’s LTE speeds aren’t as fast as Qualcomm’s yet.

So, and here’s the part that annoys me, they sell both variants (QCOM & Intel) of iPhone in the market and artificially limit the speeds…

…on the Qualcomm version (& presumably they can use cheaper/smaller antennas as well) to match the Intel basebands. They do have band 66.

So Apple, unlike the Android OEMs including Google who exclusively sell Qualcomm all-in-one Snapdragon SoCs in the North American market…

…sells the iPhones with Qualcomm radios in every region (North America, Korea, Japan, China) where there’s a major CDMA carrier…

…,but sells the (slightly inferior specs but otherwise identical) same iPhone 8/8+/X) variants in regions or with carriers that aren’t CDMA…

…like T-Mobile & AT&T phones on contracts in the US, with the Intel basebands. But then they don’t use the Qualcomm baseband to its full…

…potential because then they wouldn’t be able to charge the same price for the ones with the Intel basebands. Kind of ridiculous, really.

I’ll tweet some more about LTE & Android vs. iOS (I have nothing bad to say about either of them other than the 4x4 MIMO & LTE Band 66).

That person I retweeted was very informative on the subject. The only thing I can possibly add from a technical perspective (but you can…

…easily confirm on the Wikipedia page) is that LTE Band 66 is basically the UMTS2100 / LTE band 1 frequency bands, which have been used…

…in Europe & Asia (& in test labs everywhere, because the test equipment all generates it) from the beginning, except with the uplink (UL)…

…frequency shifted. The US government used to use some of the spectrum where the UMTS/LTE band 1 is, but it seems to be freed up now? 🤔

Sorry for the delay in tweets just now. I was looking at some charts I found to compare to the list of LTE bands. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequ…

I know that some of this spectrum was used for space (satellites, radio astronomy) and US military use, where band 1 is, but not any more?

Anyway, the FCC sold off a bunch of spectrum for what is now LTE band 66, which you need to buy a 2017 model year phone to get access to. 💸

It’s kind of a money grab for the FCC, and the handset makers (Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG) & chip/OS makers (Qualcomm, Apple, Google) benefit

…because they can sell new LTE band 66 phones in the US (all UMTS & LTE phones ever made since around 2006 support band 1, I’m pretty sure)…

…but Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Dish, & a few others paid a lot of money to the FCC to buy the new band 66 spectrum. phonescoop.com/articles/artic…

The big 3 complained about Dish network’s bidding tactics, but the exercise raised over $41 billion for the US. 🇺🇸💵 wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/defau…

But wait, there’s more. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the even newer LTE band 71, which even fewer phones support, which T-Mobile…

…won in a different auction. It’s a 600 MHz band carved out of a completely different US spectrum auction in 2008. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_d…

So, the 2008 Digital Dividend spectrum auction for the space freed up by analog TV providers moving out of the 600 MHz band during the DTV…

…transition raised almost $20 billion and T-Mobile won the winning bid for the spectrum that is now LTE band 71. Apple doesn’t support it. 🙁

It seems like not many Android phones support LTE band 71 yet, but anyway Apple supports band 66 but not band 71.

So all of the advantages of getting a new phone with band 66 apply to all the US carriers but Sprint. Band 71 is only for T-Mobile US.

LTE band 71 is so new that even the new #Pixel2 phones don’t support it (they do have band 66), which would be useful for Fi as well as TMO.

Which is sad, since the Pixel 2 is the best #Android phone you can buy, according to @RonAmadeo, who should know. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/1…

I’m on Verizon with an iPhone 7 Plus, which is an excellent phone, but now that I know it doesn’t have band 66, I can’t recommend buying it.

You’re far better spending the extra money for iPhone 8 Plus (or 8) to get LTE band 66, wireless charging, faster CPU, and a glass back. 🤔