SK Telecom has announced the successful commercialization of five-band Carrier Aggregation (CA) and 4×4 MIMO—key technologies of LTE-A Pro, the advanced stage in LTE evolution. These enhancements are intended to boost data transmission speed and network performance, representing an early application of 5G-era capabilities that support gigabit-level throughput and significantly increased network capacity.
The five-band CA LTE-A Pro service from SK Telecom delivers peak data rates up to 700 Mbps, allowing users to download a 2 GB file in approximately 23 seconds. This service is currently available across 53 cities in South Korea.
In addition, SK Telecom has combined three-band and four-band CA with 4×4 MIMO to introduce a 900 Mbps LTE-A Pro service. This higher-speed service is operational in central areas of six major cities: Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Gwangju, Daejeon, and Ulsan. SK Telecom expects that the latest premium smartphones will support LTE-A Pro features, and plans to integrate the five-band CA offering with the 900 Mbps service to expand coverage to more than half of the Korean population by the end of 2017. The company is also targeting a 1 Gbps LTE-A Pro service in the first half of 2018 by combining five-band or four-band CA with additional LTE-A Pro technologies such as 4×4 MIMO.
SK Telecom’s available spectrum resources as of February 2017 include: 10 MHz in the 800 MHz band, 20 MHz in the 1.8 GHz band, 10 MHz in the 2.1 GHz band, and both 10 MHz and 20 MHz holdings in the 2.6 GHz band.
Earlier this year, South Korean operator LG U+ deployed a routing solution based on network functions virtualization (NFV) with support from Juniper Networks. That deployment emphasized resiliency through features such as auto-recovery and auto-healing, while offering modular customization and compatibility with third-party hosted operating systems, hypervisors, and orchestration tools.
The South Korean telecommunications market remains substantial in size and continues to be driven by data demand. A recent market study from Wise Guy Reports valued service revenues at approximately $32.1 billion and projected total telecom service revenue of $32.9 billion for 2016, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 0.7% for 2016–2021. Growth is largely fueled by data services: mobile revenue represents roughly 60.7% of the market, and mobile data is expected to account for about 79% of mobile service revenue by 2021.