“Today we have 24 carriers around the world that provide LTE for iPhone 5,” Mr. Cook said. “Next week, we’re adding 36 more carriers for LTE support. These carriers will be in countries that were previously not supporting LTE.”
Should help Apple move more iPhones to over 300 million subscribers in the countries where LTE support is available.
Nice to see you posting more often, Peter. Been busy since Mr. D. went to NAMM.
From http://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/ we can see that the 3 iPhone 5 models support bands 4/17 (aka AT&T), 1/3/5/13/25 (aka Verizon), 1/3/5 (aka EU+Asia)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LTE_networks we can guess where Apple will expand its LTE coverage.
South America requires a new model supporting band 7 or 38.
It can expand to Africa (band 3) with the EU+Asia model.
For EU, only band 3 (1800Mhz) is supported but many countries are deploying in band 7 and 20. This leaves Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland. EU is very convenient with many countries with at least one carrier on band 3. This helps have a lot of new carriers. However, Apple won’t be able to properly cover EU until it also supports bands 7 and 20.
Middle East can also be easily expanded on band 3.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/
As I said: Africa, Middle East and mostly EU. And EU is great to add quickly many carriers: many small countries with multple carriers per country.