SEOUL, Jan. 20 ( Yonhap) - Major mobile phone companies of South Korea, SK Telecom Co. and LG Uplus Corp., said this Monday , that this year they are planning to launch a network service that is four times faster than the current service of long term evolution (LTE).
The largest mobile operator in the country, SK Telecom said it has successfully developed the updated service , known as the three bands advanced service LTE (LTE -A) , by combining a bandwidth of 20 MHz and two bandwidths of 10 MHz.
LG Uplus Corp. also announced this Monday that it plans to launch in 2014 the 3 bans service LTE -A of the same speed, which reflects the intensified technological battle between the industry players.
The third largest mobile operator in South Korea created the service by combining a bandwidth of 40 MHz in the 2.6 GHz band, a bandwidth of 20 MHz in the 800 MHz band and a bandwidth of 20 MHz in the 2.1 GHz band.
Both companies insist that their 3-band LTE -A service will be the first in the world.
The new services are based on the technology of carrier aggregation (CA ) , which has more than two frequency bands to increase bandwidth and offers download speeds of up to 300 megabits per second ( Mb / s ) , approximately four times faster than the 75 Mb / s of the current LTE network , the companies said .
It is also faster than the 150 Mb / s and 225 Mb / s of the LTE –A service and the widest bandwidth of LTE -A, respectively.
3-band LTE –A service will allow mobile devices to download a movie from 800 megabytes in 22 seconds, which is faster than the minute and 25 seconds that it takes using the existing LTE services and 43 seconds with services LTE -A .
SK Telecom added that next month at the World Mobile Phone Congress held annually in Barcelona, Spain, it will show a 3-band service LTE -A, by combining three bandwidths of 20 MHz , which has a download speed of 450 Mb / s .
The company also said it plans to continue studying the services of 4 or 5 bands of LTE -A to achieve even faster speeds.
"The CA 3-band technology marks another advance from the widest bandwidth of LTE -A and our demonstration shows our technological competitiveness," said LG Uplus in its statement. “The service will be available later this year and the facilities and network -enabled devices are under development.”
SK Telecom also said it expects the service to be available to local users at the end of 2014, as soon as compatible mobile devices to the network will be thrown by the manufacturers of smart phones.
At present, the market leader, SK Telecom, controls about half the market, followed by KT Corp. and LG Uplus, and all of them are competing to take the lead in LTE technology.
