Hspa

The new iPad brings with it the option for a new, dual radio that brings with it 72Mbps LTE on AT&T and Verizon in the US and Rogers, Telus, and Bell in Canada. Sadly, there's no international LTE support for Australia, Asia, or Europe yet, perhaps due to the differences in LTE segments around the world. However, the new iPad also brings a new 42Mbps HSPA+ radio for AT&T, Canadian, and international carriers that support it. (Technically dual 21Mbps HSPA+ radios.) Those are theoretical speeds though -- what you get in a lab when alone, sitting on top of a tower. In the real world we're often lucky to see half the theoretical speeds, and often considerably less. That's why we put them to the test.

There were rumors the 2011 GSM/AT&T iPhone would have an HSPA+ radio for faster download speeds but when Apple announced the iPhone 4S, while they said it would do 14.4 mbps, they only listed it as an HSPA device.

Now, some are of the opinion that anything under 21 mbps should qualify as HSPA+, so iPhone 4S with only 14.4 mbps speed shouldn't qualify. However, 3GPP release 7 doesn't mandate that faster speeds are necessary to qualify as HSPA+ -- a device can support any 3GPP release 7 feature and still be classified as HSPA+. The Qualcomm chipset in iPhone 4S uses 3GPP features, and so it's an HSPA+ radio, speed be damned.

AT&T isn't getting an LTE iPhone 4G any time soon but they are launching 4G, in fact -- look up, look down -- they just did! Actually, what they did was call HSPA+ "4G" because it goes faster than regular old HSPA 3G and because T-Mobile is already doing that and Sprint is calling WiMax "4G", and Verizon is calling early LTE "4G", so why not? And when real LTE 4G comes out, that could be called 4G as well (though I bet they'll call it 5G to have even more Gs, because that's better, right?)