A new report says that when the iPhone 5 debuts in Fall, it will launch simultaneously on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. It’s about time.
More interesting? Despite the fact that over a million iPhone users are on T-Mobile already, they are doing so without 3G access, just EDGE. When the iPhone 5 comes around, that’s about to change.
According to MacTrast:
Following our report yesterday that Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5 will be arriving on the Sprint network, a contact within T-Mobile who claims to have been briefed on the matter has informed us that, in addition to arriving on Sprint at launch, the iPhone 5 will arrive on T-Mobile’s network at launch as well.
The informant, who requested to remain anonymous, went on to claim that the iPhone 5 would also operate at 3G speeds on T-Mobile US network. Current unlocked iPhone 4 units can only operate at at 2G “edge” speeds on T-Mobile’s network, and lack certain network-dependent features, such as Visual Voicemail.
I’m sure there’s at least a million people on T-Mobile hoping this is true, and really, why wouldn’t it be? It’s in Apple’s best interests to have iPhones on every network they can, and now that AT&T’s exclusivity deal has lapsed and Verizon has the iPhone, there’s just no reason not to bring them to the other two big networks too.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
