T-Mobile Carrier Update to Bring LTE to Unlocked iPhone 5 Owners

LTE

TmoNews is reporting that T-Mobile will enable LTE support, along with a handful of other features previously not available, on unlocked iPhone 5 handsets through a software update on April 5th. The source, who appears to have gotten its hands on an internal document, notes that T-Mobile will also enable Visual Voicemail, MMS Settings and Network/Device optimisations for iPhone users with the iOS update.

“The T-Mobile Carrier Update is a minor iOS software update that enables official iPhone support by T-Mobile. When installed, the software update enables a handful of capabilities like Visual Voicemail, MMS Settings and Network/Device optimizations that customers do not have access to today. On April 5, the software update will begin being pushed via OTA to all iPhone devices on the T-Mobile network with iOS 6.1.x or higher.”

The news is of most interest to current T-Mobile customers who want to take advantage of the carrier’s LTE network without updating to Apple’s new T-Mobile/AT&T iPhone 5 variant set to launch on April 12th. And if OTA updates can bring support for AWS LTE, then newer carriers can easily push out updates for LTE support on unlocked iPhones as well.

With WIND Mobile already confirming iPhone 5 compatibility, the future sure looks bright for unlocked iPhone 5 users, doesn’t it? The only requirement now is an AWS LTE network, which isn’t currently available. What this means for unlocked iPhone 5 users in Canada is should our wireless entrants build an AWS LTE network, all it would take is a carrier update to possibly enable LTE.

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