China Mobile doesn’t officially offer the iPhone yet. But it is carrying 10 Million iPhones on its network according to Reuters.
There had been rumors that Apple would offer a TL-LTE version of the iPhone 4S earlier this year with China Mobile going as far as saying:
It appears that positive answer wasn’t for this round of devices, though the CDMA Verizon iPhone arrived off schedule in January. TD-LTE will require some separate chips which could be hard to fit inside the iPhone 4S’s enclosure. Apple however has to look longingly at that 600 million+ subscriber base, however.
While T-Mobile USA is on the opposite end of the subscriber spectrum (China Mobile has around the same amount of subscribers as the populations of Europe and the US combined), T-Mobile is the #4 carrier in the US in the midst of AT&T attempting to swallow it.
But they both don’t officially offer the iPhone, yet have a significant number of iPhones floating around on their network. Both offer a different type of high speed 4G network that stock iPhone 4Ses can’t take advantage of. Both networks do offer EDGE/GSM speeds however which some may find valuable tied with reduced fees or better coverage. T-Mobile told us earlier this year that they had over a million iPhones on their network, a figure that is likely to go up with Apple sneakily offering iPhones 4S unlocked at launch.
- Apple already selling unlocked, contract-free iPhone 4S in the United States (9to5mac.com)
- Wedbush: LTE iPhone coming 2012 with “materially improved user interface” (9to5mac.com)
- Apple appears to affirm TD-LTE iPhone for world’s biggest carrier (9to5mac.com)
- AT&T says it activated one million iPhone 4S units as of Tuesday (9to5mac.com)
- Swedish carrier: iPhone 5 will be “run over by the others” unless Apple adopts 4G LTE (9to5mac.com)
- China Mobile had secret iPhone meetings with Steve Jobs (9to5mac.com)
- Apple to release 4G TD-LTE iPhone, China Mobile allegedly confirms (9to5mac.com)
