SK Telecom, the first carrier to claim a commercial ‘LTE-Advanced’ service, is already reaping rewards from its cutting edge investments. The Korean market leader says the number of subscribers on its new LTE-A network has topped 300,000, a month after launch.
The carrier has deployed a key feature of the long menu of enhancements supported in the LTE-A standards (3GPP Releases 10 and 11), carrier aggregation. In doing so, it doubled its 4G speeds to a peak download rate of 150Mbps.
This is a feat which is being emulated by some other LTE operators ‘ its own compatriot LG U+ and NTT Docomo are among those using LTE-A carrier aggregation for this purpose, while the UK’s EE has made the same speed ramp, though without moving to the new standards. Instead, it has freed up a single 2x20MHz carrier in its 1.8GHz spectrum to enable the 150Mbps headline figure, a technique which does not require Release 10.
SK Telecom now covers the whole of the capital Seoul and the central areas of 84 cities nationwide, a target it has reached a month ahead of schedule. It plans to continue the expansion and will deploy 32,000 base stations to do so.
In its second quarter results, SK Telecom saw sales up 3.9% year-on-year, to KRW4.164 trillion ($3.74bn). Growth in its very competitive and near-saturated market mainly came from LTE subscriber growth as well as enterprise solutions. As of June 20, SK said it had over 11m LTE customers, or 40% of its total mobile base. It also saw a strong rise in consolidated net income, driven by lower marketing costs, higher operating income and a strong contribution from chip affiliate SK Hynix.
Meanwhile, Japan’s NTT Docomo is to deliver 150Mbps speeds in its first market, Kawasaki, which will act as a testbed for launches in larger cities, including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, on October 1. Kawasaki is Japan’s ninth largest city. Docomo now covers 130 cities with its ‘Xi’ LTE service and expects its 4G base to total 25m by the end of 2013, after three years of LTE operation.