South Korea’s leading telecom operator, SK Telecom, has launched the world’s first LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) service in the country which can offer download speeds twice as fast as LTE networks.
The move follows the launch of the world’s first LTE-A phone by South Korean electronics giant Samsung, the Galaxy S4 LTE-A.
The LTE-A network is claimed to offer ultra-fast speeds of about 150Mbps, which is double the speed compared to the speed of LTE and 10 times more than 3G network and allows users to download an 800MB movie in 43 seconds.
SK Telecom has also commercialised the Multi Carrier (MC) technology with the use of Carrier Aggregation (CA) that is expected to improve customer satisfaction in mobile Internet services and increase the use of ultra fast video contents.
Carrier Aggregation is said to support speeds of about 150Mpbs by combining two 10MHz component carriers to form a bandwidth of 20MHz spectrum band.
In order to adopt Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) in 2014, the company has already applied CA and Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP).
SK Telecom president of Network Business Operations, Park In-sik, said: "By supporting twice faster speeds than LTE, LTE-A will not only enhance customers’ satisfaction in network quality, but also give birth to new mobile value added services that can bring innovative changes to our customers’ lives."
According to the company, the current LTE price plans will also be applicable to the new LTE-A service, while it also plans to integrate services like Safe Message and Safe Data Backup as basic features in all its LTE-A phones.
Additionally, the company will launch a group video calling service for up to four users that is a revamped version of the 3G network-based multi-party video conferencing service and is expected to support 12 times better video quality and 2 times clearer audio quality.
