Will the iPhone 5 work on T-Mobile?
Talking at CES 2012, Neville Ray, CTO of T-Mobile USA, says that an AWS-compatible iPhone might be coming soon. According to him, the current lack of T-Mobile support goes back to the fact that the various iterations of the iPhone radio chip have never supported the AWS band that T-Mobile USA uses. He believes that with the current and next generation radio chipsets all supporting AWS, Apple will likely include support for the band, making it possible for the next iPhone — the iPhone 5 — to operate on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network.
A little background research reveals that there has been an iPhone that included a radio chipset that supported AWS, but it was not capable of connecting to networks on AWS due to additional hardware factors. The Verizon iPhone 4 uses Qualcomm’s MDM6600 (part of the Gobi 3000 series), which Qualcomm has declared does support the AWS band for HSPA+. In fact, the Qualcomm MDM6600 is a tri-mode cellular radio chip, supporting GSM+EDGE, HSPA+, and CDMA2000 1X with EV-DO. However, the rest of the radio structure only supported CDMA2000 on the Cellular and PCS bands used by Verizon.