Courtesy: (Chris Hondros / Getty Images)

The long awaited announcement today of the iPhone being available on Verizon brought great relief to sufferers of AT&Ts sputtering network.  But there is a catch, isn’t there always a catch?

At least initially the iPhone will only be available for Verizon’s CDMA spectrum and not the next generation LTE spectrum (Verizon 4G).  As soon as I heard this, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend who works at Apple on the iPhone back in the fall.  That person mentioned what a pain it was to work with Verizon’s CDMA network as the user experience was different than the current iPhone.

Why is that you may ask?  Well with Verizon’s CDMA network, iPhone will only be able to do either a phone call or data but not both at the same time.  Also, if you are an international traveler, your iPhone is a paper weight overseas.

It is not all bad news.  The most important part of the announcement today is that we have a choice in networks.  Choice hopefully will result in better quality networks and potentially pricing.  Even though I will not be switching, enough people will that hopefully my experience on AT&T will improve.

The key for people wanting to buy the iPhone on Verizon is patience.  As Verizon fully rolls out LTE, the safe assumption is that Apple will build an iPhone with an LTE chip in it.  Apple and Verizon’s immediate goal is to get the earliest adopters to buy in, and then 3 or 4 months from now when the next generation of iPhone is released, those users pay a premium to upgrade.  At least that is my prediction.