I've seen PLENTY of folks with working lte. The ONLY reason it wasn't brought up by the FCC is because none of the us markets or carriers had MAJOR lte in that band when the n4 was in production. And to my knowledge the update wasn't mandatory to begin with.
Sent from my Sprint Galaxy Nexus rockin 4.2.2 using Tapatalk 2
"working" isn't the same as officially supported.
For one, the tear down reveled that the amplifier and filter were missing in the phone. That suggests that while it might be able to get a signal it won't be consistent or reliable enough for official support.
I've used LTE in the Annapolis area and even when I have full LTE bars, I get down speeds that are about half of HSPA+. Maybe that's a product of a less than full roll out but it also could be a product of a lack of supporting hardware. The reason the chipset has LTE is cost. It was cheaper to not change the board out from the Optimus G, which is basically what the N4 is inside.
And, the GNote2, iPhone 5 and another phone, can't remember which one, have all gotten or are getting OTA updates to enable LTE on TMO. It's possible for a phone to be setup to handle a band before the band is put in place.
Nah, the OTA wasn't mandatory but it's all that Google could do really to disable the use of LTE.
I hope I'm wrong here, and I very well could be. But based on everything I've read and my limited "testing" of LTE around here I really don't think we'll see an official OTA to make it work. For me, hacking it back on has proven to be unreliable as well. HSPA+ is just overall better and more stable, even when I