Today, electronics repairing company, iFixit has noticed that the Google Nexus 4 uses a Qualcomm WTR 1605L 4G LTE chip which supports up to seven bands during an iFixit teardown. Now, it is clear that both LG and Google have intentionally disabled LTE on the device.
Last month, Google’s Andy Rubin stated that the lack of LTE is a “tactical issue” and “a lot of the networks that have deployed LTE haven’t scaled completely yet — they’re hybrid networks which means the devices need both radios built into them, when we did the Galaxy Nexus with LTE we had to do just that, and it just wasn’t a great user experience.” Different carriers use different radio frequencies, having a device that would support multiple radios would not only be more costly, but could also affect the battery life on the device. Now many LTE devices including Apple’s iPhone 5 and LG Optimus G use larger batteries and more efficient chips to balance the power draw from LTE.
Even though the presence of the LTE radio is confirmed, there is no guarantee that the device will support LTE. Well one may try with different hardware or software techniques. The things that are not clear are that the device may not have an antenna that supports this radio. moreover iFixit found no LTE power amplifier on the board that is the LTE Chip is not powered. Even if all the hardware issues have been sorted, the software drivers may be an issue. And What about the carriers, they might have disabled LTE in Nexus 4. So there are a lot of issues to see LTE working on this device.
Though the Nexus 4 has no LTE capability, the device is sold out in most places on different carriers.