[marshray]

Why would they put in the chip if it didn't have an antenna?

I think T-Mobile is selling their HSPA+ as "4G", even though it's not using LTE yet. So it's not that no GSM carriers would advertise the phone as "4G".

Perhaps they designed and/or manufactured the circuit boards before they had the frequencies all sorted out. Perhaps they need the chip in there for patent licensing reasons.

[cube13]

>Perhaps they need the chip in there for patent licensing reasons.

Actually, maybe someone can answer this. Does anyone know exactly what the cost is(both in licensing and materials) for a 4G LTE chip vs the antenna?

[marshray]

I doubt you could get a price quote for under 10,000 units.

The company to ask is iSuppli, they specialize in reverse costing. http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/Pages/Headlines.aspx

[tadfisher]

The real reason is that they went with the Qualcomm S4 SoC, which has an LTE modem on-die. It's likely that it would be too expensive to have Qualcomm manufacturer an LTE-less chip for one device.

[marshray]

According to http://www.qualcomm.com/chipsets/snapdragon the Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8064 has LTE "on select processors". But it's still a separate chip from from the WTR1605L LTE chip.

So the Nexus 4 may actually have two unused LTE implementations ?!

[tadfisher]

Now this boggles the mind. This could be explained by the Nexus 4 sharing the internals of the Optimus G, but why opt for the off-die LTE modem in the first place?

[marshray]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6474/nexus-4-includes-support-... Looks like the LTE does, in fact, work for "band 4 AWS". This is said to be the band T-Mobile will be deploying LTE in next year.