Korea's SK Telecom and LG Uplus are launching commercial LTE services on 1 July. SK said its initial network in the 800MHz band includes 1,772 radio units and 609 digital units, with support from the operator's 200,000 existing 800MHz repeaters across Seoul, including underground and indoor areas. LG has around 500 base stations at launch, in Seoul and two other major cities; the operator aims to cover most major metro areas by September. LG targets 3 million LTE users by the end of next year and 10 million by 2015. SK plans to cover 23 cities including the Seoul Metropolitan area and six metropolitan cities by early next year, and secure national coverage (82 cities) by 2013.
National coverage could be achieved earlier than planned, depending on the market situation, SK said. The operator is already seeing a sharp rise in data usage due to the rapid uptake of smartphones in Korea, with traffic in June 19 times more than nine months earlier. SK expects to introduce LTE-Advanced, boosting the maximum speed from 75Mbps to 1Gbps, in around 2013. By 2014, around 65 percent of total data traffic is expected to run over the LTE network. SK expects an initial 300,000 users for LTE by the end of this year. It's currently using 5MHz of one-way spectrum for the service and will increase this to 10MHz by the fourth quarter.
The first LTE devices available to SK customers are a USB modem by LG Electronics and a Wi-Fi router from C-Motech. This will be followed by five LTE smartphones in September and two tablet PCs in October. With the initial modems, customers can get 5GB of data per month for KRW 35,000 or 9GB for KRW 49,000; extra data will cost KRW 0.025 per packet (KRW 51.2 per MB), which is the same as on the 3G service. Price plans for smartphones will be announced in September. Details on pricing and devices from LG Uplus were not immediately available. The third major operator in Korea, KT said it will start LTE in November.
