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AT&T Might Have Angered Customers Still Paying Off iPhone 12, iPhone 13, Pixel 6 Purchases; + more notable news

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xpxp2002
join:2014-08-29
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xpxp2002

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AT&T might have angered customers still paying off iPhone 12, iPhone 13, Pix

Been saying this since 36-month contracts became the norm. I'm honestly surprised carriers were willing to mortgage their future 5G capacity gains in exchange for selling more phones today.

Carriers are putting people into longer term upgrade cycles at a time when they're simultaneously trying to saturate the market with UEs that support 3+CA for NR so that they can launch standalone mode without taking a big throughput/capacity hit (coincidentally, this is discussed in the standalone 5G article). Those devices need the Qualcomm X65 or X70 modem for that capability, and the iPhone 14 just launched with the X65 this past week. Meanwhile, the iPhone 12 launched two years ago now, pushing "5G" big time with a chipset that doesn't even support VoNR or NR CA. I suspect iPhone 12s will likely never be supported for SA mode on most carriers due to the performance hit they'll take.

And most consumers don't see much of a benefit from NSA mode since their phone rarely needs much more bandwidth than mid-band LTE CA of at least 3 10x10 carriers can already provide today; and hotspots are often speed-capped, deprioritized and/or throttled. It helps in areas where a carrier is limited for capacity due to tower construction/NIMBY issues or licensed spectrum -- namely Verizon, who has pushed C-band and mmWave harder and all those devices can access and benefit from it. But for T-Mobile, and especially AT&T, the Qualcomm X55/iPhone 12-generation phones don't benefit much from the advancements of these early 5G launches nor the improvements that will be coming to mobile networks going forward. In fact, they'll probably suffer with declining performance over the next few years as more LTE bands are shared with NR using DSS or outright refarmed to NR exclusively.

The right answer would have been for carriers to continue encouraging 18-24 month installment plans for the next few years so that consumers are incentivized to upgrade in 2023 and 2024. Instead, there will be people buying iPhone 12 and 13 models into 2023 and stuck with devices on installment plans that can't take advantage of SA mode and 3+ NR CA well into 2026.