Korea's SK Telecom is speeding up the expansion of its LTE network, with plans to launch the service in 84 cities by April 2012, eight months earlier than originally planned. Limited services were launched earlier this year in a few big cities, but the mobile operator has seen demand growing faster than expected. In June the company said it expected around 300,000 users by year-end, but it already has 260,000 customers and is signing up around 15,000 a day. The quicker roll-out of LTE is expected to meet the explosive demand for data services. SK said it handles around 0.3 petabytes of data each day currently, but this is on track to reach over 1 petabyte by 2013. LTE customers use on average 45 percent more data than 3G users, or around 1.6GB per month. The company plans new pricig options such as per-download fees and monthly gaming subscriptions to better accomodate the demand. By year-end it will also start rolling out LTE mini base stations, femtocells and repeaters, to enhance indoor coverage for the service.
