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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

Remember, outside of the US LTE is essentially a non-feature, so there are lots of people who don't actually care. Then there are the people who could use LTE, but find their current network fast enough.

I live in a place with no LTE, but honestly if it were to degrade battery life I'd rather live without it: faster network is always nice, but the current one is fast enough.

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It may not be widely deployed outside the US, but that doesn't mean new devices shouldn't support the new standards.

Imagine if when Microsoft was designing Windows 7 they said "well, no one is using IPv6 right now so we won't include any support."

The difference between Windows 7 supporting IPv6 and the Nexus 4 supporting LTE is that LTE requires a physical chip that costs extra to manufacture. Why force all users to pay extra for an LTE radio if most users will not see any benefit from it?

The difference is Google will release another Nexus within one year that will likely have LTE. MSFT makes a new Windows version every 4 years or so.

> Imagine if when Microsoft was designing Windows 7 they said "well, no one is using IPv6 right now so we won't include any support."

That's not a fair comparison. IPv6 is required so our internet doesn't crumble around us, LTE is just getting cat pictures to your eyeballs quicker.

Current operators don't have voice working on LTE, phone vendors need to keep both 3G and LTE radios on to kludge around this.

When the operators/LTE network vendors get their voice act together, phone vendors can start selling proper LTE phones.

Due to faster download times it can apparently actually _boost_ battery life in some web surfing scenarios.

Not that it matters if your network has no LTE.

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