SK Telecom LTE-A service through smartphones offers network speeds of up to 150 Mbps, which is two times faster than LTE, and 10 times faster than 3G network.
Taking one more giant leap in the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) market, SK Telecom’s LTE-A users can download an 800MB movie in 43 seconds.
SK Telecom will offer LTE-A service at the price of LTE. This means, there will be no increase in price for the new version.
The commercialization of LTE-A enables the company to improve customer satisfaction in mobile Internet services, and increase the use of ultra fast video contents and other diverse mobile value added services.
SK Telecom already applied Carrier Aggregation (CA) and Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP), and plans to apply Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) in 2014.
CA supports up to 150Mpbs speed by combining two 10 MHz components carriers to form an effective bandwidth of 20 MHz spectrum bands.
CA will be advanced to realize up to 300Mbps speed by aggregating two 20MHz component carriers by 2015, and become capable of combining three component carriers by 2016. In addition, they expect to see the realization of uplink CA by 2016. The current CA standards allow for up to five 20 MHz carriers to be aggregated.
Till today, 13 operators of 8 nations, including Verizon, AT&T, NTT Docomo and Telenor, have announced plans to launch LTE-A, and among them Sprint, Telstra, 3 Italia and Yota said that they will do so within this year.
SK Telecom also released Samsung’s Galaxy S4 LTE-A, the world’s first phone optimized to work over LTE-A network.
It plans to provide a total of seven different LTE-A compatible smarphones in the second half of 2013.
The company begins offering LTE-A in Seoul and central areas of Gyeongg-do and Chungcheong-do, and plans to expand LTE-A coverage to 84 cities nationwide.
