News
Operator to roll out 4.5G in June; eyes 1-Gbps service by 2019.
SK Telecom has revealed plans to begin rolling out LTE-Advanced Pro next month, with a view to offering a peak mobile speed of 1 Gbps to the 90% of Korea by 2019.
LTE-A Pro is the official title given to the 3GPP’s LTE Release 13, which includes upgrades to carrier aggregation (CA), and support for LTE-unlicensed (LTE-U) and licence assisted access (LAA), as well as 256-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) – a signal modulation scheme that offers a higher data rate. It is sometimes referred to as 4.5G.
According to a Korea Times report on Sunday, SK Telecom plans to roll out five-band CA, 4×4 multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) and 256-QAM with a view to covering all metropolitan areas by 2018, and 90% of Korea’s population by 2019, using 90,000 base stations.
The mobile operator said that the combination of these network upgrades will enable it to offer a theoretical peak connection speed of 1 Gbps. With the addition of LTE-U, the maximum speed would rise to 2.7 Gbps, the company claimed.
The news emerged after SK Telecom earlier this month paid 1.28 trillion won (€964 million) for two blocks of 2.6-GHz spectrum during the country’s recent auction.
"Through this month’s frequency auction, we have established a basis to provide the nation’s only five-band carrier aggregation service," said Choi Seung-won, senior vice president of SK Telecom’s network division, in the Korea Times report.
Other operators are pushing ahead with LTE-A Pro as well.
Swisscom in April announced a successful LTE-A Pro trial; it plans to roll it out from early 2017.
Meanwhile, at this year’s Mobile World Congress, Australian incumbent Tesltra shared plans to launch a 1-Gbps mobile broadband service utilising CA, 4×4 MIMO, and 256-QAM in central Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney later this year.
