The 4G public relations battle has shifted to ‘LTE-Advanced’, which is being widely presented as a major big bang upgrade akin to LTE itself, rather than what it really is ‘ a long menu of enhancements, from which operators will pick and choose according to their needs and the availability of devices. So SK Telecom’s claim to launch the world’s first commercial LTE-A services, while interesting, actually focuses on a select few options from 3GPP Release 10, notably carrier aggregation and CoMP, which will help boost peak download speeds to 150Mbps.
Harnessing carrier aggregation to achieve 150Mbps rates is the most popular first-wave LTE-A strategy among operators worldwide and several, such as the UK’s EE, have announced plans to activate these capabilities this year. They will be cheered by the fact that SKT has launched a high profile smartphone to support its new services from day one ‘ shortage of devices will be the biggest brake on mobile broadband upgrades, and while carriers can usually source modems and Wi-Fi hotspots fairly easily, consumer uptake generally takes off only when big-name handsets are offered.
SKT’s first LTE-A device comes, unsurprisingly, from Samsung, in the shape of the Galaxy S4 LTE-A, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processor/modem, and the cellco promises seven smartphones by the end of 2013. The Galaxy device will also be launched soon by SKT’s smaller rival LG U+, which is hard on its heels in terms of carrier aggregation, though each operator will have its own exclusive variant with different colors (red for SKT, blue for LG). The larger cellco has ordered an initial 20,000 units according to TelecomAsia.
Existing LTE customers will have free access to the improved services ‘ initially available in central areas of capital Seoul; 42 cities in Gyeonggi-do and Chungcheong-do; and 103 university areas. This will expand to 84 cities by year end.
As well as carrier aggregation, SKT is deploying CoMP (coordinated multipoint) technology to enhance coverage, and plans to add another key LTE-A feature, eICIC (enhanced intercell interference coordination) next year. The latter is particularly important for supporting dense networks of small cells without interference.
SKT knows, better than most, that services and content drive uptake, not technology buzzwords, so its new services will be heavily marketed alongside popular content offerings such as its Btv mobile video streaming system and a new T Baseball Multiview option. This will enable users of the existing free baseball broadcast service (numbering 1.1m), which is optimized for LTE, to watch two games at once. SKT will also add a group calling service for up to four users, based on its 3G videoconferencing platform but with higher quality audio quality and full HD video resolution. And it will upgrade its T Freemium multimedia content package from August, adding HD video shopping channels and expanded sports highlights.
Other carriers will be racing to adopt the LTE-A label too. T-Mobile USA was the latest to promise LTE-A features by year end, as it races to catch up with the larger US operators. It would not specify which items it would support first, though carrier aggregation is likely, given that TMo has both AWS and 1.9GHz spectrum.
A far less popular item on the LTE-A menu is LTE Broadcast, but this is likely to be adopted for certain use cases by the major US carriers, and the latest operator to test it is KPN of the Netherlands. It will start trials late this year or in early 2014, working with Ericsson.
All this activity leads ABI Research to predict that LTE-A subscriptions will reach 500m by 2018, which will be one-third of the LTE total of 1.47bn by that date. That would represent CAGR of 295% between 2013 and 2018. The main driver will be the US, say the researchers, who believe that market will represent 44% of global LTE-A subscriptions in 2018, or 220m. “All the major US mobile operators in the United States have shown their commitment to LTE-Advanced, and LTE-Advanced upgrades are underway,” said practice director Jake Saunders. In 2018, Asia-Pacific will have 159m LTE-A users and there will be 55m in western Europe.