Analysis: The Elephant in the Room - EDGE on the iPhone?
There's no question that today's iPhone annoucement is huge news both for Apple fans and the wireless industry in general. Apple has beat my (and I suspect almost everyone else's) expectations in almost all areas, save one--the cellular technology they've chosen to integrate with the iPhone. For those of you who may not know EDGE is a so-called 2.75G technology and not one of the new 3G technologies now being rolled out by most of the big cell carriers. The upshot of this is much lower bandwidth than 3G standards like EVDO (on Verizon and Sprint and other CDMA providers) and UMTS/HSDPA (on Cingular and other GSM providers). The analogy many people use is that EDGE is more like dial-up and HSDPA is more like broadband. EDGE tends to get real world speeds in the range of 70Kbps to 135Kbps (on a good day), while wifi is of course much faster (real world is generally about half of the rated speed, so about 27Mbps for 802.11g).
The Keynote seemed to demonstrate pretty quick downloads on the iPhone, but the real question is how fast things will be on the EDGE network rather than via wifi. Obviously the inclusion of wifi mitigates the problem when you're in range of a base station, but I'm really curious to see how data intensive services like Google maps and web browsing really work when you're on Cingular's network.
A final question will be Cingular's data pricing: will there be an affordable all you can eat data plan for the iPhone?. We're so used to seeing Apple push the technology envelope in other areas, it really seems like a strange choice to integrate last generation wideband technology in its new flagship product. Of course, none of this is going to stop me from getting one. What do you think?
