Apple Has Verizon Cell Sites On Campus, Possibly For Testing CDMA iPhones

John Brownlee ()

Apple Has Verizon Cell Sites On Campus, Possibly For Testing CDMA iPhones

If you pull back and look at the grand scheme of things when it comes to the globe as a whole, a Verizon iPhone 4 doesn’t make so much sense: Verizon uses the CDMA protocol, and that’s not an international standard, so why would Apple bother?

Yet bother, they might very well being. During today’s questions and answers session, Jobs mentioned having Verizon cell sites on the Cupertino campus.

As 9 to 5 Mac notes, cell sites cost a buttload, so Apple’s got them for a reason.

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Is Apple covering their bases? Or is the Verizon iPhone imminent? My guess is Apple is as sick of AT&T’s garish ineptitude and poor customer service as anyone, and they’d be willing to plunk down some significant change to have a chance of giving them the boot domestically.

10 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone, News |

  • Connor Turnbull

    I’m sure Apple have Verizon phones such as the Droid to test them. Obviously, they do from the videos shown at the press conference. Although a CDMA iPhone is likely, I don’t think he was referring directly to that.

  • Mike

    Or much more realistically, like any large campus, cell towers outside campus don’t permeate through, so they have Verizon and likely Sprint and T-Mobile towers on-campus for employees and visitors who have cell phones not on AT&T.

    There is no CDMA iPhone. The world goes way beyond the American borders where such a thing would be useless. It’s a dying technology. Get used to it.

  • sbi

    Steve is smooth. He dropped that tidbit to change the subject. And it’s working.

  • Mikael Fransson

    You don’t Verizon paid for the cell? I think the’d be all over a CDMA iPhone….

  • Terry

    Note that Steve mentioned iPhones availability internationally in the 17 countries except for South Korea…which is not ready yet. South Korea is completely on CDMA network. No GSM.

    So CDMA iPhone will exist. Verizon iPhone availability is apparently not a technology/network/choice issue, more probably a business terms with Verizon and AT&T contract exclusivity terms.

  • cv

    Mike is partly right: the Verizon tower is there for employees and visitors who aren’t on AT&T.

    There probably are CDMA iPhones on campus: prototype units in high-security labs. This doesn’t necessarily imply that they will reach market. Apple — like other consumer electronics companies — experiments with many designs, many of which never see the light of day (or a store shelf).

    Terry is wrong about South Korea. You do not need to run CDMA in South Korea; a UTMS phone is adequate. Both the iPhone 3GS (and iPhone 4) are dual-mode GSM/UTMS handsets. The original iPhone is a GSM/EDGE phone and would not work in South Korea.

  • Bob

    You know that carriers pay significant sums of money to property owners for the right to erect cell towers, right? Apple didn’t pay anything…in fact, they’re almost certainly pocketing a good chunk of change (though just a pittance compared to their own revenue). People are reading way too much into this.

  • goosesensor

    Uhhh this means absolutely nothing. As cv pointed out, not everyone on Apple Campus has a freaking iPhone. Sheesh.

  • Andrew

    Goodness, this story is on here, Gizmodo, and probably countless other sites and blogs. You’d think these people would have more of a clue than to read so much into this.

    In context, he says he can’t replicate the death grip on campus because of having cell towers from the two largest wireless companies in the country. You know, so that AT&T and Verizon can provide service to the thousands of people that work at Apple. Why people think this has anything to do with testing phones is beyond me.

  • Tim Rosencrans

    And Brownlee makes another worthless post. The Apple campus is huge and I doubt these sites were put in last week. I’m willing to bet both these cell sites predate the iPhone itself by many years. I’m pretty sure a few people at Apple used cell phones before the iPhone was even a concept.

    and of course the obvious…You don’t use public cell sites to test research level prototype phones! These phones aren’t actually connecting to AT&T until field test stage.