Apple has initiated LTE on its iPhone 5 in 36 countries, including South Africa, requiring an upgrade to iOS 6.1.
But, be warned you need to activate the service with Vodacom’s call centre or your phone won’t latch onto the network, as I discovered this morning.
Vodacom is the only network that has been activated by Apple, which must give its approval to every operator that sells its phone before LTE is enabled on the device.
Solving the problem is easy enough, once you have done the iOS 6.1 update. Follow these steps:
1. Go into Settings > Cellular and turn off LTE.
2. Call 111 and activate your phone number for LTE.
3. Restart the phone.
4. Go back into settings and turn LTE back on.
Here are some extra details from Apple’s press release:
CUPERTINO, California—January 28, 2013—Apple today updated iOS to version 6.1, adding LTE capabilities to 36 additional iPhone carriers and 23 additional iPad carriers around the world, so even more iPhone 5, iPad mini and iPad* with Retina display users can experience ultrafast wireless performance** to browse, download and stream content at blazing fast speeds. To date, iOS users have uploaded over nine billion photos to Photo Stream, sent over 450 billion iMessages and received over four trillion notifications.
“iOS 6 is the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and with nearly 300 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices on iOS 6 in just five months, it may be the most popular new version of an OS in history,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iOS 6.1 brings LTE support to more markets around the world, so even more users can enjoy ultrafast Safari browsing, FaceTime video calls, iCloud services, and iTunes and App Store downloads.”
iOS 6 features include Siri, which supports more languages, easy access to sports scores, restaurant recommendations and movie listings; Maps with Apple-designed cartography, turn-by-turn navigation and Flyover view; Facebook integration for Contacts and Calendar, with the ability to post directly from Notification Center, Siri and Facebook-enabled apps; Shared Photo Streams via iCloud; and Passbook, the simplest way to get all your passes in one place. Additional updates in iOS 6.1 include the ability to use Siri to purchase movie tickets in the US through Fandango, and iTunes Match subscribers can download individual songs to their iOS devices from iCloud.
The revolutionary App Store offers more than 800,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users, with more than 300,000 native iPad apps. App Store customers have downloaded over 40 billion apps, and Apple has paid over seven billion dollars to its incredible developer community. Customers can choose from apps in 23 categories, including newspapers and magazines offered in Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel.
Availability
iOS 6.1 is available as a free software update today. iOS 6.1 is compatible with iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad (third and fourth generation), iPad mini, iPad 2 and iPod touch (fourth and fifth generation). Some features may not be available on all products. For more information please visit www.apple.com.