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Comment by jqueryin | Hacker News Reader

I was very interested until I got to the part of no LTE support. That's a deal breaker for me. I had a Samsung S3 that I busted and opted for the Samsung S3 Mini at one point, and the lack of LTE cost me dearly. I literally couldn't browse the internet unless I was on Wifi.

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I'm curious - isn't 3G the fallback speed when LTE is unavailable or when your phone doesn't have LTE support? Or is LTE a separate band that may exist without 3G at all in some regions?

My wife's Nexus 4 (3G) seems to get internet just as often and approximately as fast as my Galaxy Nexus (LTE). Then again I don't stream videos that often over data networks, because it sucks to hit the limit and get choked back to 2G on T-Mo.

3G is a little better then dialup while 4G is more like WiFi-802.11G

I get 7.2MB/s on my 3G...

Looks like you are a lucky one, I was not getting much faster then that on 4G ( pcworld's test results for 4 companies: http://www.pcworld.com/article/253808/3g_and_4g_wireless_spe... )

You can't use 3g? It's plenty fast for internet browsing (Right now from my phone I get a ping in the range of 60/120ms, ~10mb down and ~1mb up).

Or there are other problems?

3G is spotty. I should preface this by stating that I use Straight Talk with an AT&T SIM which is likely the other half of the problem.

LTE has one killer momentum - extremely low latency. I have to go back (temporarily) to a phone without LTE support and it's a pain, actually.

Edit: I'm from Latvia. We currently have Band 3 only LTE with Band 7 and Band 20 coming next year. And even though actual speeds are not South-Korea-like, 20Mbps+ is a norm.

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