South Korea's leading mobile carrier, SK Telecom, is on the verge of deploying a new mobile service later in the year that is 4 times faster than what is currently available in the country, which is Long Term Evolution (LTE). SK Telecom was the first carrier in South Korea to rollout LTE-Advanced back in June of 2013. The carrier's closest rivals followed in its footsteps 3 months later in September.
Now SK Telecom has announced that it plans to bring forth a lightning fast 300 megabits per second mobile Internet service in the second half of 2014. No date has been set, but it is possible the carrier might make another announcement at the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next month.
For comparison purposes, regular LTE is only capable of achieving speeds up to 75 Mbps. However, with LTE-Advanced, users can experience up to 150 Mbps if their mobile device supports it. That's very astonishing and quite faster than what many Internet users are getting from Fiber Optic connections around the world.
According to SK Telecom, its new technology, which is capable of delivering speeds up to 300 Mbps, is dubbed LTE-Advanced 3 Band Carrier Aggregation (CA). This speed is made possible by aggregating two different frequency bands. In this particular case, it would be a 20MHz bandwidth in 1.8GHz band and two 10MHz bandwidth in 800MHz band.
"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."
According to SK Telecom, a 300 Mbps connection can download an 800MB movie in just 22 seconds, in comparison to LTE-Advance 43 seconds, 85 seconds on standard LTE, and around 7 minutes on 3G. That's fast, but one has to wonder how long it would take in real word testing. Furthermore, one must realize that not every server is fast enough to allow the full potential of one's mobile broadband speed.
Despite the variables, this advancement in technology should be quite beneficial for users in South Korea, and hopefully in the rest of the world. Still, most carriers in other countries won't rollout this service in the near future due to the expense, and this also goes for carriers in most developed countries.
We, as Internet users, can only hope that technology like this becomes a worldwide thing in the not so distant future.
