LTE is not as important as you make it sound.

Mobile bandwidth is still expensive, so you only get a couple of GB per month for a decent price and if you want more, you have to shell out a lot of cash.

I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Europe (at least in my country, Romania), the 3G connections are pretty good and 4G is coming, but it's not there yet.

And I can't picture what you'd want to do with an expensive 4G connection. With my 3G connection I can watch Youtube videos just fine. But it really does work at around ~ 20 Mbps (HSPA+), which is like ~ 2 MB/s, so if I'm not careful, I can burn thorough my 5 GB plan in a couple of hours. And from personal experience, few people have more than 5 GB of monthly bandwidth.

At home I have Wifi, at work I have Wifi, all the coffee-shops I go to have free Wifis for clients, most hotels have Wifis too. The only instances where I use my 3G connection is when I commute between places or if I end-up with a shitty Wifi connection and in such instances I just browse the web casually, or read email, or read Twitter/Facebook updates. Which is what most people do.

The only heavy-usage of my 3G connection has been for Skype. But Skype works surprisingly well for me over 3G (YMMV of course).

> LTE is not as important as you make it sound.

Except you then go on to explain for a couple paragraphs that it doesn't matter BECAUSE <insert a ton of active device management>.

Here is my process for connecting with my LTE phone: I turn it on. Speed is as fast as WiFi all the time. I have a 6GB plan and have never had to worry about hitting it. That's it.

I haven't used a free WiFi network outside of work in a year. LTE is way faster. Just like the touchscreen on the front of the phone, you don't know you want it until you have it. Then, you'll never give it up.

Let's be honest here, speed isn't as fast as WiFi all the time. It's as fast as WiFi, with much higher latency, in the times you're within good range of the proper cell tower. Sorry, but its not the same as WiFi when you're sitting on the can in the windowless bathroom on the 8th floor of a big office building.

It is almost universally faster than free WiFi (i.e. at a coffee shop), which is what the post said.

I have unlimited data and a ROM that lets me tether, and it really is amazing how useful LTE everywhere is. There's no way this isn't the future of internet connectivity in general. (Unless everyone using it would somehow saturate the available spectrum?)

A big part of how much faster LTE is than HSPA+ (which the Nexus 4 ships with), is the fact that most LTE networks are massively under-utilised.

HSPA+ can run at 42Mbps in theory, but network congestion makes that a pretty much impossible situation in reality.

As more people join the LTE networks, they will get slower and slower, just as 3G has in crowded areas.

Hence why I couldn't be happier that Google is continuing to limit the Nexus line to 3G. That's the price of keeping costs low.

Much higher latency? I just tested 22 ms with my iPhone 5 on my home WiFi network, and 44 ms with LTE. Granted, that's a factor of 2, but 44 ms is pretty darn acceptable for any Internet usage, let alone mobile phone usage.

True, that one situation has caused me to switch on WiFi. However the rest of my office building and city is blanketed in pretty decent LTE coverage.

Latency is as low as 2ms. I never have latency problems on LTE.

Except I only do device management because the limited data plan is a problem that doesn't go away - and you have it too, because you're limited to 6 GB and that's not much.

This month I've been following the Coursera course on functional programming with Scala, while listening to other podcasts and stuff I follow. I like doing that in the morning, while drinking a coffee at a nice place. And because I wasn't careful about turning Wifi on (it was off for some reason), I depleted 2 GB of bandwidth in 2 hours, which was the bandwidth I had left - the connection was so good I didn't even realize that I was on 3G.

Also, I'm probably in a much better position than most people, because my monthly plan does not come with a contract, being a PrePay (PrePay plans are very competitive in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, compared to the US at least). So I can recharge as needed.

But other people are not so lucky and once you blow past the allocated bandwidth, the prices are freaking huge on a contract. I have an acquaintance who's kid watched movies on his phone and ended up with a 300 EUR bill.

So btw, if you're telling me that you don't do device management, just wait until you'll be a father.

Well, I live in Hungary (right next to you) and our pre-paid plans suck. Calling costs 2-3 times as much as on contracts, same with texting. A 3G plan with 3GB unlimited (that is they slow you down until the end of the billing cycle) costs 3500 HUF. For 4190 HUF you can get a 4G plan with unlimited browsing and 5GB for other purposes.

Using your home internet connection for intensive streaming instead of your data connection isn't device management.

As fast as WiFi? I'd hope it is faster. My home internet is 15mbps, this phone does 21, LTE does 70 or something. Do you really need to download a song in 0.5 seconds? Isn't 2 seconds fast enough?

With the LTE speed of 70mbps, you could use up your 6GB in 11 minutes.

3G doesn't come close to approaching those speeds in most areas.

It's not about how long it takes to run a download of a media file, you're completely missing the point. It's about the drastically improved latency and responsiveness in downloading complex modern web pages, streaming, and caching stuff.

For example, The Verge homepage is almost as big as a song. If the question becomes do you need to make every page load .5 seconds instead of 2 seconds then "yes" wouldn't seem so ridiculous.

Why would I do that kind of sustained downloading on my phone? That's what the server & home internet connection is for. LTE on the phone isn't for blowing through 6GB In 11 minutes, it's for grabbing the data you need as quickly as possible.

At first I thought LTE is overrated, after using it for 2 weeks, its hard to go back. If you constantly on the go and need to check things out quick on your mobile, LTE makes the experience 'keeping pace with your move', there is less 'little waits'.

More info: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3569688/why-nexus-4-does-...

LTE isn't even available yet in my country and it's not the third world, but France. 300 euros is cheap for a smartphone like the Nexus 4, in comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S3 is 500 euros on amazon.fr and it's the cheapest price you can get for it, it's more like 600 euros everywhere else.

The lack of LTE won't be a dealbreaker for most people, and probably even those who live in the USA. $300 hits the right price point for a flagship phone and the upside of owning a nexus and getting Google's support is huge. I'd rather get an iPhone than an android that is not a Nexus. Both OS are constantly evolving and getting better, waiting for the carriers and OEM to get their shit together is getting old.

Honestly why do you want LTE?

You are going to burn through your data alotment very, very fast.

That's what I thought would happen before I got an LTE phone, but in practice, I'm not burning through it that much faster – I'm mostly just following the same usage patterns I had with 3G, just spending less time waiting.

I'm in the same boat. I don't consume media on my phone, like, ever though, except Subsonic and even then I relisten to my favorite music of the month enough that it gets cached quickly.

Yes. Some of us have unlimited plans.

What I like about LTE is the decreased latency (rather than the higher peak speed).

I had a 3G iPad, and now I have an LTE iPad. The difference is quite noticeable in the Bay Area at least. So for a tablet device I strongly prefer LTE at this point.

Not necessarily. I've had LTE since July and am very happy with it. I don't use crazy amounts of data, but when I am using it I like the zippiness compared with 3G.

With LTE everywhere comes bigger data allotments. It's very easy to get 10/10 Mbps with LTE.

Low latency. Reduction in the 3G "time to first data" lag.

Why? I'm perfectly happy with HSPA+. I'll take at least 3G everywhere over LTE.