[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.