If you've spent some time in the Apple world, you've probably encountered the term "baseband" at least once—typically as part of a discussion on why jailbreaking seems to be so hard.
Despite those frequent mentions, however, this important component of every iOS device doesn't often receive attention outside of highly technical realms. Most often, it is dismissed as little more than a curious piece of firmware responsible for blocking those who run afoul of Apple's locked-down operating system, but there's much more to it than that.
The man behind the curtain
At its most basic, the baseband is a combination of hardware and software responsible for managing some of the most fundamental functionality of a mobile device. It drives the radios that communicate with cellular networks, translating radio signals to and from data that the device can actually use, and validates your phone to ensure that it can be used with a specific provider (for example, through a SIM lock).
This may seem like a mundane, even boring task—the modern equivalent of the noisy modems that the old folks among us used to connect to bulletin board systems and early Internet providers. In reality, it's a job of mind-boggling complexity, because cellular technology is a hodgepodge of specifications that have evolved over two decades and encompass thousands of protocols and other standards. To put things in perspective, the spec for 3GPP, which is the basis for 3G GSM networks, is made up of more than 2,000 documents—and that doesn't even count more modern protocols like LTE or Verizon's EVDO.
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