The Nexus 4 and the fact that it doesn’t ship with LTE support on any of the major carriers caused a bit of controversy when the phone was officially announced. Despite the fact that Google stated that they wanted to keep updates coming on time and without the intervention of carriers, nobody really believed them and it was all a little bit of a mess for Google. However, you can’t blame the company for not wanting to go into LTE with some of the major carriers, especially after the trouble that the Galaxy Nexus on Sprint and Verizon had getting simply updates – they quickly became less Nexus and more like any other phone on the network.
Recently, it was discovered – through a teradown of the phone – that the Nexus 4 comes with a dormant LTE radio that is most likely left over from LG’s production of the Optimus G, as the internals are practically the same. This got the community thinking about the possibility that LTE could be “unlocked” somehow on the device but, this was shot down by the fact that while the radio for LTE might be there, the antennae aren’t there and so signal reception would be terrible.
However, some enterprising Canadians have done the impossible and have got LTE – on Telus over the 1700/2100 Mhz bands – to work and there’s video to prove it. If you’re in Canada and you want to go ahead and get this working all you have to do on your Nexus 4 is input the following into the dialer: *#*#4636#*#*, this will then take you through to the phone menu and you can select the connection type on the phone, from a list if you select “LTE/GSM/CDMA auto”, the phone will lose signal and then reconnect with LTE, provided it’s in your area of course. It’s pretty easy to do and if you’re covered by Telus LTE – reported to work with Rogers as well – then give it a go and let us know how you get on! While the down speeds might not be what some are getting with HSPA+ on T-Mobile the upload speeds certainly confirm that it is LTE If you don’t believe us then check out this video from Tek Gadg: