Regardless of whether it's true if the next iPhone has 4G, who cares?
They quote spotty coverage and battery issues as a reason.
But if I were Apple I would most certainly not support it for a very different reason: why offer a product that can eat your data bundle in two minutes?
The real bottleneck in almost every country in the world is the high price per gigabyte. That price will go down eventually, but not by a lot in the life time of that phone (3 years tops).
There's a few factors that determine price:<p>A physical / technological limits, such as 3G / 4G masts<p>B number of masts<p>C number of customers<p>Even in a perfect market B can't keep up with C until the market is a bit more saturated with smartphones. But in many countries, including the US, phone companies have nasty monopolies and other incentives to not hurry up with building capacity.<p>So let's stop the hype over 4G and focus on reaching $1 / gigabyte and decent bandwidth during rush hours first.