Verizon CEO May Be The Reason Your iPhone 5 Has LTE

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Not altruism: this is why Verizon wanted LTE on the iPhone.
Not altruism: this is why Verizon wanted LTE on the iPhone.

Speaking at a conference for the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam mentioned that he had talked to Steve Jobs about the power of LTE in a meeting with the late Apple CEO. McAdam said that he spent some time trying to convince Jobs to add an LTE radio to Apple’s then-unreleased iPhone.

“I was really trying to sell him and he sat there without any reaction. Finally, he said, ‘Enough. You had me at 10 Mbps. I know you can stream video at 10 Mbps,'” said McAdam.

While the quote is quintessentially Jobsian, the talk with the head Verizon honcho was probably not the only reason Apple added LTE to the iPhone 5. If reports are to believed, however, the iPhone 5 was designed to be the size and shape it is today because of the inclusion of the higher-speed networking abilities of LTE and 4G.

Whether this was the true tipping point that put the LTE radio into the iPhone 5 or not, it’s a fun story. In the final call, of course, LTE has become the new standard for cell data on all smartphones, led by the iPhone 5. According to The Verge, LTE data traffic accounts for more than half of Verizon’s total traffic on its network, which shows why McAdam was pushing the technology in the first place.

Source: Fierce Wireless
Via: The Verge

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