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iPhone 15: mmWave 5G Remains Limited to U.S. Models

max2 said:
That is stupid.
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Pretty good chance that Apple pays less in modem fees for the bandwidth they do not use. Stronger US dollar probably makes that fee all that more expensive outside the USA.

Follow the money.

( at some point demand for the feature outside the USA will make Apple pony up and pay ... but if they can just pocket the difference and/or throw that as ForEx overhead... they probably will. )
 
cflem said:
I live in Dallas and I’ve NEVER experienced mmWave in an AT&T flagship market.
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The key factor above is 'AT&T' . This isn't classic technology leading AT&T (whose home market was NOT Dallas) ... it is some pale imitation posing with the same name.
 
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deconstruct60 said:
Pretty good chance that Apple pays less in modem fees for the bandwidth they do not use. Stronger US dollar probably makes that fee all that more expensive outside the USA.

Follow the money.

( at some point demand for the feature outside the USA will make Apple pony up and pay ... but if they can just pocket the difference and/or throw that as ForEx overhead... they probably will. )
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mmwave requires additional hardware. Theres an antenna port on the right side of the phone thats plastic and the mmwave antenna sits inside there.

Modem will have support by default but without the additional HW you can't use it even if mmwave is supported on the modem.

The hw is physically missing to enable mmwave. Why include it on models where people are in countries that are less likely to encounter mmwave.
 
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ACHD said:
welcome to low CBAND with Carrier aggregation.. It penetrates well. OR your building has a tower in it.

if its an office building carriers will install equipment inside at times.
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No one is installing anything nice in this old piece of **** building... lol.
 
ACHD said:
normally stadiums, concerts, other perm venues will have it.

for those do have it service is usable. even Cband is brought to its knees. But with mmWave you can ensure a good experience without having to deploy additional towers.

Some do not remember or have noticed but when a game would be out they would deploy CoW's and other equipment to provide additional capacity and it still sucked.


each and every carrier did this.

Now if they have a MMwave system they do not need to do that as a good portion of phones can switch to that and the remaining normal capcity of LTE and cband can handle the rest.


I do not yet know if MMWave has a CoW system yet as thats normally LTE/5G so other venues without the infrastructure wont have it.


The maps for mmwave tend to be pretty accurate though
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Verizon has COLTs with mmWave support. However, from what I've heard from a Verizon engineer, the challenge is getting temporary 10 Gbps backhaul to a COLT.

mmWave in permanent installations, like stadiums, arenas, college campuses, and fairgrounds, with 10k+ admittance is the future of delivering reliable, working cellular service to these types of environments. Traditional sub-6 bands on DASes can only do so much. Controlling SNR in those environments -- especially open air stadiums -- becomes a challenge that can't be overcome on sub-6 bands. You can't beat physics, so best to embrace our new mmWave future. :)
 
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I see threads like this and I laugh before realising that I’m on O2 in the UK which is so congested that I would be quicker to send my iMessage printed out on paper and attached to a carrier pigeon than through their network.

Annoyingly EE has the capacity but there are certain villages and parts of Milton Keynes that EE don’t work at all and O2 is the only option, I mean some signal is better than none right? lol.
 
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laszlo182 said:
What’s the point of mmWave? Speed? I was able to achieve 1000-1500 MB/s on 5G in Greece, using european iPhone 12 Pro.
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The point is capacity. It's not about 1 device getting 1-4 Gbps of unadulterated throughput. It's about being able to serve thousands of devices in a small area with usable capacity.
 
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xpxp2002 said:
The point is capacity. It's not about 1 device getting 1-4 Gbps of unadulterated throughput. It's about being able to serve thousands of devices in a small area with usable capacity.
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How many users can Wifi handle compared to mmWave or just normal cellular data ?
 
max2 said:
How many users can Wifi handle compared to mmWave or just normal cellular data ?
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Far fewer. Because it's a shared medium, rather than being circuit- or "connection-" based, raw user count isn't something that can be easily quantified. But available bandwidth is.

Currently deployed mmWave bands being in the 28-39 GHz range mean that propagation is much easier to control than 2.4/5.8 GHz Wi-Fi. This makes it possible to keep the noise floor much lower when you have thousands of devices transmitting at the same time in close proximity to each other. Moreover, current mmWave implementations scale up to 8x 100 MHz channels, compared to Wi-Fi where a single 40-80 MHz channel is generally the most you can utilize with the channel reuse patterns that are normal for large-scale deployments.

It's simply a different technology. Wi-Fi was never designed to be used at scale in stadiums with 30,000 devices simultaneously transmitting. A lot of good work has been done to adapt it better to those environments. But everything from the frequency ranges to the subcarrier spacing with FR2 (mmWave) makes it a much better technology for dense environments.
 
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So this might be a dumb question but as someone who travels a lot and does not need mmWave at all and still uses SIM cards - how hard is it for a US customer to buy an EU iPhone from Apple?
 
I'm sure all the europeans and australians who live in the 5 square meters that have mmWave will be kicking rocks, dreaming they lived in the US and could take advantage of the 15 square meters of mmWave accessible using a US iPhone. :(
 
stiligFox said:
So this might be a dumb question but as someone who travels a lot and does not need mmWave at all and still uses SIM cards - how hard is it for a US customer to buy an EU iPhone from Apple?
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IF you are traveling in another country ... just buy it there. (tons of non USA folks fly into NYC and buy at the major store there. )

The USA stores are mainly trying to activate folks on the major USA carriers. Same thing with the USA website.

Probably easier to get some 3rd party vendor of iPhone to ship to a foreign address than with Apple's 'per country' e-stores/physical stores.
 
I'd would expect Apple to remove mmWv in the US as the tech is not widely adopted and pretty much useless because of the limited coverage and terrible penetration (blocked by a single tree leaf). Most carrier will probably fade it out pretty soon.
 
cocky jeremy said:
This is while inside of a metal building with no visible towers outside.

View attachment 2260823
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I don't think you need MM waves for that, I just tried my "old" 12 pro where we don't have it.
1694634853765.jpeg
 
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