SK Telecom has revealed more details about its 5G network investment and 5G pricing in Korea.
SK Telecom’s 5G price is cheaper than its LTE package. But 5G offers more speed than 4G in Korea’s select towns and crowded places.
SK Telecom has the widest 5G network coverage in Korea. The telecom operator has built 34,000 units of 5G base stations in the country.
The company has expanded its 5G network in data traffic areas, including main areas of 85 cities nationwide (Seoul, six metropolitan cities, etc.), university districts, KTX, sports stadiums, expressways, subway lines (Seoul and Seoul Metropolitan Area) and beaches.
SK Telecom’s 5G network has ensured in-building coverage in 120 department stores, shopping malls and airports. SK Telecom provides four times faster in-building data rates than its competitors by utilizing four antennas of a smartphone.
SK Telecom will expand 5G network coverage to nationwide subways, national parks and festival sites — in the second half of 2019.
SK Telecom’s 5G network supports up to 2.7Gbps data transmission speed. 5G users take more than one minute to download a 12GB VR content via 5G network alone. SK Telecom’s 5G customers take only 36 seconds to download the same content over SK Telecom’s 4G-5G aggregated network.
SK Telecom’s 5G network is designed to flawlessly support services that require ultra-low latency such as smart factory and autonomous driving.
SK Telecom has secured the safest 5G network by applying quantum cryptography technologies to eliminate the risk of hacking and eavesdropping.
Park Jung-ho, chief executive officer of SK Telecom, said: “SK Telecom will continue to introduce 5G-based innovative services to lead all areas of New ICT.”
5G Price Plans
SK Telecom has introduced 5GX price plans to be launched on April 5, 2019. 5GX price plans consist of four different plans.
Slim offers 8GB of data (1Mbps speed after data cap) at KRW 55,000 month and 5GX Standard comes with 150GB of data (5Mbps after data cap) at KRW 75,000 per month.
Those who subscribe to 5GX Prime or 5GX Platinum until the end of June 2019 will be able to use unlimited data without speed restrictions at KRW 89,000 and KRW 125,000 per month, respectively.
Without this promotion, 5GX Prime will offer 200GB of data at KRW 95,000 per month, and 5GX Platinum will provide 300 GB of data at KRW 125,000 per month. Unlimited data will be provided until the end of December 2019.
Compared to its LTE price plans, the company is offering the same amount of 5G data at lower prices. For instance, 5GX 75, which provides 150GB of monthly data allowance, costs KRW 4,000 less than T Plan Family (LTE plan) priced at KRW 79,000 per month.
Considering that subscribers to selective contract discount plans can receive 25 percent discount from these prices, their monthly 5G plan costs become more affordable.
SK Telecom plans to update its price plans after analyzing the data usage patterns of subscribers of unlimited plans.
5G content
SK Telecom has secured 8,000 different content in diverse areas including game, ultra-high definition (UHD), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and communications.
SK Telecom has joined hands with Riot Games to create VR and AR versions of League of Legends (LoL) Champions Korea and begin broadcasting the games exclusively from the first half of 2019.
The company will offer five different games including the world’s No.1 VR game Gunjack. Through partnership with Hatch, SK Telecom will exclusively provide 5+ streaming game content. It also plans to begin offering Kartrider VR under cooperation with Nexon.
SK Telecom plans to offer Harry Potter AR in the first half of 2019 through partnership with Niantic.
The company will alleviate customer’s cost burden by applying technologies like 5G Media Compression Technology, which reduces data consumption by more than 30 percent, and HEVC codec, which can decrease content capacity by up to 50 percent.
Baburajan K
