Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has been limiting the modem speeds of the iPhone 7 built for Verizon Wireless’s network in order to match the slower speeds of the AT&T iPhone, according to reports Friday by Bloomberg and Recode.

The Verizon iPhone 7 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon X12 modem that is capable of LTE download speeds of up to 600Mbps, while the AT&T model uses an Intel XMM 7360 that goes up to 450Mbps. But Apple limits the Verizon model so that it performs similarly to the AT&T one; to achieve this, Apple may disable certain features of the network chip, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg’s report is based on data from testing firms including Cellular Insights, which wrote about its findings on its blog.

“Out of all supported features by Qualcomm’s solution, Apple has chosen to implement 3-Way Carrier Aggregation on the downlink and 2-Way Carrier Aggregation on the uplink for contiguous Band 7 or Band 41,” Cellular Insights analyst Milan Milanovic wrote. “Higher Order Modulation (DL-256QAM, UL-64QAM), and Higher Order MIMO (4×4 MIMO) have not been implemented. Therefore, the peak theoretical downlink speeds are limited to 450Mbps when aggregating three 20MHz wide LTE component carriers.”