It’s often a bummer to be a cell phone manufacturer catering to the United States, one of the few countries to have dual competing technologies with GSM (AT&T) and CDMA (Verizon). In the past that’s meant producing two different devices such as Apple did with the iPhone 4, but that could be a thing of that past come this fall.

TechCrunch is reporting “the upcoming iPhone 5 will almost certainly be a single phone that supports multiple networks,” a rumor we’ve heard before but have seen little evidence to support the idea. The idea is to produce one handset capable of running on both Verizon’s SIM-less CDMA-based network as well as AT&T’s GSM-based network, which uses SIM cards to identify subscribers.

Apple has thus far treated the Verizon iPhone 4 as a bit of a red-headed stepchild -- the device still hasn’t been updated to iOS 4.3, which means highly touted features such as AirPlay and iTunes Home Sharing have been MIA for customers favoring The Big Red Network. So what’s the best way to keep feature parity without having to support two models of the same device? Why, creating a dual-mode “world phone” that caters to both.

“I was recently approached by a developer of some of the most popular apps on the iOS platform today, who asked not to be named and offered solid proof that supports the above claim,” writes Robin Wauters on TechCrunch. “According to this person, and app usage logs I was sent, a tiny number of people have recently registered for one of their applications from a single, brand new Apple device that is decidedly dual-mode -- meaning it supports both CDMA and GSM.

“The logs show that the app has been briefly tested by a handful of people using what is almost certainly an iPhone 5, evidently running iOS 5, sporting two distinct sets of mobile network codes (MNC) / mobile country codes (MCC),” the report continues. “Those codes can be used to uniquely identify mobile carriers.”

You probably know how this story ends: This single Apple device appears to be using MNC/MCC codes from both AT&T and Verizon, which means the handset is capable of calling from either one. It wouldn’t be the first time a manufacturer has done such a thing -- a number of RIM BlackBerry models over the years have been sold as “world phones” capable of using Verizon or Sprint’s CDMA as their home network, while roaming elsewhere in the world where GSM service is predominant.

These dual-mode handsets require a chipset provided by Qualcomm, who already provides the baseband for the CDMA iPhone 4 model. Assuming that Apple has enlisted the company to provide a dual-band baseband for the iPhone 5, Cupertino could now focus on manufacturing more units of a single model, which can then be sold anywhere in the world.

The big question is, will the device come unlocked on the GSM side? If Apple continues to lock the handset to AT&T’s service here in the U.S., all this “world phone” excitement will be for naught, because we’ll all be chained to the telco’s exorbitant roaming rates when traveling overseas. However, Apple’s move to sell the iPhone 4 unlocked in this country earlier this year could be a telling sign for what’s to come this fall.

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(Image courtesy of Gadgetsteria)