Apple appears to finally be listening to other manufacturers and their carrier partners and is learning how REAL signals engineering is done.  In their original iPhone implementations, Apple’s engineers appear to have made that assumption that the network will conform to the needs of the phone in order for them to get a decent level of battery life out of the phone. What they’ve learned over the past few years is that the phone has to be nice to the network and can’t be totally dependent on the network in order to make its battery last.