Ericsson announced that SK Telecom, a major mobile operator in South Korea, has tested mobile broadband using Ericsson's Licensed Assisted Access solution, during which it achieved data speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s to smartphones in an indoor environment.
Ericsson noted that Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology utilises licensed LTE spectrum and unlicensed spectrum, and in the testing SK Telecom used one LTE 20 MHz band and three WiFi 20 MHz bands, also applying Ericsson's 4 x 4 MIMO functionality in the LTE frequency band. Additionally, Listen-Before-Talk technology was applied to both the WiFi and LTE networks to optimise the utilisation of available spectrum and reduce resource contention.
Using Ericsson's LAA solution, broadband users are able to connect via WiFi automatically to leverage the benefits of LTE. This enables users to access the network more quickly and, when terminating a session, network resources are released more quickly. This helps improve the utilisation of the unlicensed spectrum and service quality.
* Recently, SK Telecom announced that in collaboration with Samsung Electronics and Nokia it had demonstrated 5G communications using the 3.5 GHz band for the first time in Korea. SK Telecom teamed with Samsung Electronics to develop a 3.5 GHz 5G end-to-end network with 5G virtualised core, virtualised RAN, distributed unit (baseband and radio unit) and test device based on 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) standards elements.
* SK Telecom also worked with Nokia to co-develop 5G base station equipment and test device for the 3.5 GHz spectrum and achieved Gbit/s-level throughput during a field trial held near its Bundang office building through the application of carrier aggregation to increase bandwidth. The two companies also measured link quality (BLER) depending on the distance between a moving vehicle and base station.
* SK Telecom stated that with the successful trials of 3.5 GHz 5G networks, it has secured the essential technologies to deploy 5G networks using above-6 GHz and below-6 GHz frequencies. The company expects that 28 GHz, a potential above-6 GHz frequency in Korea, will support tens of Gbit/s through the use of a wide bandwidth of hundreds of MHz, while the 3.5 GHz band can be used to provide wide area coverage.
