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The iPhone 5 must support a laundry list of incompatible cellular networks if it wants to embrace 4G, as any iPhone user who lives in Smalltown USA can attest. Even amidst talk of whether the iPhone 5 could support the 4G LTE being pushed by Verizon and AT&T, the broader-yet-slower 4G variants popularized by Sprint and T-Mobile, or both, the 4G two-headed coin is actually more of a triangle. Any discussion of the next iPhone and the next network must include a chapter on backwards compatibility. And that third prong of the discussion is a complicated one. 4G will theoretically replace all previous cellular networks eventually. But try telling that to those AT&T iPhone users, for instance, who are still waiting for 3G to arrive in their small sized hometowns (hint: it never will). As such, the iPhone 5 will have those folks still living on the edge, literally, as AT&T’s decrepit EDGE network is still all they have to feast on for now. So where does this leave Apple? With a mess. If there is to be a single iPhone 5 which works for both Verizon and AT&T customers, it’ll need to support Verizon’s CDMA network, AT&T’s 3G GSM network, and AT&T’s EDGE network. And that’s on top of 4G LTE, which both carriers desperately want included, yet neither carrier can seem to build out their 4G LTE network swiftly enough to make their collective litany of older networks excludable. Apple could opt to make the 4G iPhone 5 puzzle simpler from a technological angle by opting for continued complication at the retail level: separate 4G iPhone 5 models, one for Verizon which talks to 4G LTE and CDMA, and one for AT&T which works with 4G LTE and 3G GSM and EDGE. Or there’s the other method which no one seems to be rooting for but which would simplify things quite a bit: leave 4G out of the iPhone 5 equation entirely and instead make a hybrid model which merely supports the Verizon and AT&T networks which have actually been built yet. If the iPhone 5 arrives without 4G, some may be tempted to blame anything from Apple’s stubbornness to the incompatibility within the 4G ranks; if the iPhone 5 expands to T-Mobile and/or Sprint, the 4G prospects would be even messier. But what it really comes down to is the millions of small town folks who will be lining up to buy the iPhone 5 in a region where they’re still living on the edge (network). And before you go blaming those folks, keep in mind it’s not their fault that the carriers never did finish building their current-generation networks before they began getting all googly-eyed about the next one. So what do you think? Will the iPhone 5 include 4G? Post your thoughts below. Here’s more on the iPhone 5.

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