4G Verizon iPhone to Debut After Christmas?

MacDailyNews reports that it has received information from a "source that we believe to be credible" regarding management training for the Verizon iPhone offered by the company last week. According to the report, the Verizon iPhone will launch immediately after Christmas and is in fact an LTE 4G device.

- The new iPhone is an LTE device and that fact - the only "LTE iPhone," exclusive to Verizon - will be the main marketing theme; i.e. "For the new '4G' (cough) verizon network" that Verizon has already started promoting
- As rollout of LTE not actually widepsread, Verizon iPhone will have multi-band chip backward compatibility with regular CDMA

The report also claims that the Verizon iPhone is already shipping to Verizon warehouses, and the carrier will maintain control over all stock until launch in order to control information leaks.

Finally, the source indicates that the iPhone 5 was intended to be LTE-only at its debut next summer, but Steve Jobs and Apple are upset that the carriers are not building out their LTE infrastructure quickly enough to make that happen.

Verizon's 4G network launched last week for mobile broadband customers, but the carrier noted that it does not expect to debut 4G-capable handsets until the middle of next year.

MacDailyNews is not a frequent source of rumors, and has a mixed record on the information it has published in the past. In addition, we are skeptical that Apple had ever seriously planned for the fifth-generation iPhone 5 to be "LTE-only", given that even the most aggressive LTE build-out schedules from the carriers have long planned for it to be several years before their entire networks are upgraded to the standard. In fact, other sources have indicated that the fifth-generation iPhone won't support LTE at all, a move which would follow Apple's precedent with not supporting 3G in the original iPhone as it waited for greater availability and more advanced technology for utilizing the standard.

Consequently, we are publishing this rumor on Page 2 for interest and discussion.

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