South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom plans to launch a service dubbed 'LTE-A Pro' in June. Subscribers will have access to speeds of up to 500 Mbps. SK Telecom plans to provide LTE speeds of up to 1 Gbps nationwide by 2019, The Korea Times reports, citing SK Telecom's infrastructure strategy division senior VP Choi Seung-won. "Through this month's frequency auction, we have established a basis to provide the nation's only five-band carrier aggregation (CA) service," he said.
In the 2 May spectrum tender, SK Telecom added 50 MHz of LTE bandwidth, securing a total of 70MHz download bandwidth for faster mobile services. KT and LG Uplus both won 50MHz in the auction.
SK Telecom plans to provide its faster broadband service in metropolitan areas by 2018 and expand coverage to 90 percent of the nation by 2019 with more than 90,000 base stations. SK Telecom plans to add the latest LTE technologies such as 256 quadrature amplitude modulation and 4x4 MIMO to its 2.6GHz network to boost speeds. SK said that once it is able to provide both the LTE-A Pro and five-band CA technologies it will achieve speeds up to 1Gbps.
