SK Telecom plans gigabit LTE for first half of 2018
SK Telecom says it covers 53 cities in Korea with LTE-Advanced Pro coverage that utilizes five component-carrier carrier aggregation and four-by-four multiple-input-multiple-output antenna technology, and that it’s getting ready to launch gigabit-speed LTE-A Pro in the first half of 2018.
The 5CC carrier aggregation implementation supports speeds up to 700 Mbps, and SK Telecom said that it has just added six cities where users on the Samsung Galaxy S8 (with an over-the-air firmware upgrade) can achieve speeds of up to 900 Mbps LTE-A Pro through a combination of 4×4 MIMO and three-band/four-band CA. Those cities are Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Gwangju, Daejeon and Ulsan.
“SK Telecom’s LTE-A Pro services represent an early application of 5G technologies that support Gbps-level data speeds and massive network capacity,” said Choi, Seung-won, senior VP and head of SK Telecom’s infrastructure strategy office, in a statement. “4.5G can be considered as the very last stage of LTE and will facilitate the spread of immersive multimedia services, including virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D hologram content.”
The carrier said that it “plans to aggressively expand the coverage of its LTE-A Pro services” and that between the five-band CA coverage and the 900 Mbps coverage, those offerings “will cover more than 50 percent of the Korean population by the end of this year.”
SK Telecom also plans to push its network to achieve gigabit LTE services in the first half of 2018 and said that it is deploying the five-band CA support, 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM modulation support to base stations across its network in preparation.
