SK Telecom announced that it will launch a new LTE-Advanced service, dubbed as LTE-A Pro with speeds of 500Mbps compared to the current speeds of 150Mbps on the 1st of June this year. The largest operator in South Korea also said that it plans to increase the speeds further to 1Gbps by 2019.
"SK Telecom will provide LTE-A Pro, which is about 7 times faster than the original LTE service, through its five band carrier aggregation service starting on June 1", said Choi Seung-won, senior vice president of SK Telecom's infrastructure strategy division. "With the carrier aggregation (CA) service, LTE-A Pro will be a bridgehead for the development of 5G technology."
To achieve the 500Mbps speed level, the Operator said that it will leverage the LTE-A techniques such as 256 quadrature amplitude modulation and four-by-four multiple-input multiple-output for its 2.6GHz bandwidth to boost network speeds. When it combines LTE-A Pro and five-band CA technologies, it would be able to reach 1Gbps, said SK in a statement.
