Monday, January 20, 2014

SK Telecom Tests 3-Band LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation

Monday, January 20, 2014  , , , ,  

SK Telecom has successfully tested LTE-Advanced 3 Band Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology.

The technology aggregates 3 bands – 20MHz+10MHz +10MHz – to support speeds of up to 300Mbps. Client devices will need chipsets capable of aggregating 3 bands.

SK Telecom said its testing help advance the global standardization process for LTE-Advanced 3 band CA.

“With the successful development of “LTE-Advanced 3 Band CA”, SK Telecom further strengthens its global leadership in telecommunications technologies,” said Park Jin-hyo, Senior Vice President and Head of Network Technology R&D Center at SK Telecom. “SK Telecom will continue to make strenuous efforts to provide unmatched service quality and speeds, which will lead to the overall advancement of the global telecommunications industry.

SK Telecom also noted plans to showcase its LTE-Advanced 3 band CA at MWC 2014in Barcelona next month. The company expects its demonstration will achieve 450Mbps by aggregating three component carriers (20MHz+ 20MHz+20MHz).

http://www.sktelecom.com/en/press/detail.do?idx=1054


In November 2013, SK Telecom demonstrated downlink speeds of 225 Mbps by using LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation to combine 20MHz bandwidth in 1.8GHz band and 10MHz bandwidth in 800MHz band. For comparison, the carrier's regular LTE service delivers a maximum of 150Mbps of speeds using 20MHz of continuous spectrum in one band.

SK Telecom said its planned upgrade to LTE-Advanced (20MHz+10MHz) will enable mobile customers to download an 800MB movie in just 28 seconds, significantly faster than other networks. Measured at their maximum speeds, downloading the same movie file via 3G, LTE, and the existing LTE-Advanced (10MHz+10MHz) would take 7 minutes and 24 seconds, 1 minute and 25 seconds, and 43 seconds, respectively.

The company said that it expects to launch the ‘20MHz+10MHz’ LTE-Advanced service nationwide through smartphones in the second half of 2014, pending release of LTE-Advanced smartphone chipsets.