5G on Apple's iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro won't be equals

Rumours around the upcoming iPhone 12 have been coming out every other day, and now, a new leak suggests that the iPhone 12 could come with a Sub-6GHz 5G radio while the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max could sport the mmWave 5GF radio.

Jon Prosser, a tech analyst and the leakster who gave the world the release date for the iPhone SE (2020) is the man behind this leak. He is also the one who a few days ago leaked the possible pricing for the upcoming iPhone 12 models. According to Prosser, Apple will forego the more expensive mmWave 5G radio in the iPhone 12, and instead use a sub-6GHz radio instead. The iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max will come with both sub-5 and mmWave 5G compatibility. Along similar lines, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo had noted in an investor note a few weeks ago that Apple’s 5G-enabled iPhones may come a month late due to the impact of the Coronavirus.

Currently, operators around the world are implementing 5G networks either in the sub-6GHz band or in mmWave band, which lies between 24GHz and 39GHz. The advantage of mmWave is that it is a high capacity, high bandwidth 5G model, but the problem with current mmWave signal is that it degrades extremely fast over larger distances. This is where sub-6, or sub-6GHz 5G steps in. 5G signals carried below the 6GHz frequency will have far greater penetration, as the frequencies do not degrade in the presence of objects. This means that you may not have the ultra-fast 5G speeds that come thanks to the use of mmWave, but you will have a much stronger 5G signal more of the time than when compared to mmWave. Speeds on the mmWave 5G network have shown to hit 1Gbps while the sub-6 5G networks report speeds between 100-400Mbps.

India is expected to deploy its 5G infrastructure in the Sub-6 band, meaning both the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro models will work with the Indian 5G infrastructure. The challenge will be for those customers who buy the iPhone 12 with its sub-6 5G radio and then travel to areas where the network provider uses mmWave standard for 5G.

The announcement for the next iPhone 12 series is still slated for September 2020. We’re not sure if Apple will host an event like they always do, given the fact that they cancelled the WWDC 2020 physical event. This year, Apple has announced that the annual developer conference would be a virtual one, and if the COVID-19 situation does not improve, it is possible that the iPhones would be launched in a similar fashion.