Glad it was just miscommunication (and I still blame USA Today for being unclear in the first place).

I see your point now, and it makes perfect sense.

My only point was, as I said, that contra what you seemed to be saying, current iPhones won’t gain the ability to use a 700mhz network if this deal goes through; no current phone will.

(That’s why I quoted your last sentence; if you just shelled out for a new iPhone now, you won’t get bupkis from opening up 700mhz, though I’m sure Apple will immediately offer new iPhones with the capability, if they think it makes business sense and doesn’t kill battery life.)

Further, the article, which I actually read, says “Whoever wins this spectrum has to provide … truly open broadband network — one that will open the door to a lot of innovative services for consumers,” and “The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls.”

It says that the spectrum auction winner has to provide an open network in that frequency range. It says nothing about requiring phones to have access to it, only that the network must not require a specific phone.

Plus, what it mentions stripping out of phones is Wi-Fi (“Some handset makers actually strip out Wi-Fi features at the request of U.S.-based carriers“), which is not the 700mhz band, but in the 2.4 or 5ghz band (and which the iPhone has,and its WiFi is not locked to AT+T’s network in any way.)

WiFi, not 700mhz, is what is removed from some phones (higher-end ones and PDA phones; I don’t think any version of my Motorola v55x has ever had WiFi) – non-PDA phones don’t normally have WiFi, as they’re not normally intended as a data phone to begin with. A few are starting to trickle in as Skype or other VOIP solutions.

I think the real problem is that USA Today is incapable of writing about technical issues clearly, since it’s confused three distinct wireless systems (2.4-5ghz WiFi, 700mhz (as-yet-unused outside of TV), and cellular phones (in the US, around 800 and 1900mhz for GSM and CDMA)) in such a way as to make it easy to confuse the three.

Nobody has 700mhz capabilities to strip out, because the 700mhz band is still allocated to TV (“The 700 MHz spectrum, being vacated by TV stations as they go digital, is coveted for its ability to penetrate walls and other obstacles.“) and isn’t even up for auction until next year, and there isn’t even a standard picked for the “open network” that Chairman Martin also hasn’t even written the rules for yet.

They can’t even begin to make the hardware for 700mhz networks until the decision is made as to how that network will work, since there’s no universal hardware that can handle an arbitrary network protocol (we don’t even know who’ll choose, and whether they’ll choose GSM or CDMA).

That’s why I said what I said, after reading the article, which told me the very things I brought up.

The POINT is cell phones ordinarily have the capability to use the 700 MHz channel. Cell phone companies have lobbied against the inclusion of this capability because they want to charge customers to use the air waves.

If the FCC proposal passes, cell phone manufacturers will have to stop omitting this capability, thus freeing up cell phones to use the channel.

Huh? iPhones don’t have 700MHz band hardware.

Some Future iPhone With 700MHz Hardware(tm) could use such ubiquitous services, but nothing on the market now can.

Mandating that the 700mhz band be open would have zero effect on any current hardware (not just iPhones), since not a single piece of it uses that frequency range (not surprising, since the band isn’t available to use yet, and no services exist on it yet.)

(And it’s commonly believed (Apple may have even said it outright) that the iPhone uses EDGE for its non-802.11 data band to save battery life; if their goal was maximum connectivity they could have simply gone with 3G for this iteration, but it would have killed their battery life.

Even if the FCC mandated that all phones be “unlocked”, which they don’t seem poised to do, I don’t know that anyone else HAS an EDGE network in the US, and the iPhone doesn’t have hardware for the other setups.)