I told you about this before (here and here) but minister Sehnaoui confirmed it on twitter yesterday.
For the many Lebanese who will benefit from the price reductions (the phone is going for $800 max these days for the 16GB capacity) to buy the iPhone 5 either for themselves or for their loved ones this Christmas, there’s one important thing you need to ask the shop from which you’re buying the phone: which country did you get it from?
If they got their iPhone 5 from the United States or Canada, model being A1428, the LTE that will launch later in 2013 won’t work on it as the chips are incompatible.
If the country of origin is anything in Europe or Australia, then it will work. The model should be A1429.
If you can’t but buy it from the United States, here’s a way you can do it: send the person buying it for you to an Apple Store and get them to buy a no-contract Verizon iPhone 5. It will have the sim card slot fully unlocked and its LTE capabilities are compatible with the frequency that’ll be launched in Lebanon soon.
For those of you who have already bought their iPhone 5 without asking about the country of origin, tough luck. Odds are you won’t be able to benefit from LTE once it’s rolled out.
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares 
This just ruined my day!
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You should have been reading better 😛
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Nicola Senhaoui’s solutions to any of the telecom challenges and problems in Lebanon are perfunctory.
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While I agree when it comes to certain aspects, it’s not the case with this particular issue.
The US and Canada (their GSM networks basically) are the only ones in the world employing the LTE frequency that is in the iPhone that same Lebanese buy from those countries.
Every other country in the world uses the LTE frequencies which are available on the non-North American iPhone.
The Lebanese problem is in the fact that we don’t have an official launch for the device. Phone shops immediately buy them from whichever countries they can get, not caring about these details. If we had had an official iPhone launch, things would have been much smoother.
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All the Iphone Models sold in lebanon are A1428 except some of them, wouldn’t be easier if the Alfa and Touch update thei LTE to work on all bands?
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It’s not an update, it’s a hardware issue. Very few countries in the world (USA, Canada & Mexico basically) use the frequencies employed in the A1428 phone.
I’d rather have Lebanon’s LTE be compatible with most of the world.
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lets wait and see what apple can do, maybe an update on A1428 software will fix this issue. dunno
NB : In Lebanon only the A1429 GSM model is compatible with both networks.
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