Ericsson and SK Telecom take LTE-Advanced to the next level – Nov 29, 2013– Seoul, Korea (Techreleased) – In this major step towards SK Telecom – a leading South Korean telecommunication operator – further enhancing its LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) commercial service network, local entity Ericsson-LG supported the demonstration on commercially released software from Ericsson.
The demonstration occurred on November 28 when SK Telecom held a press conference in South Korea to demonstrate an upgraded LTE-Advanced service that offers up to 225Mbps of speed by aggregating 20MHz bandwidth within the 1800MHz band and 10MHz bandwidth within the 850MHz band. LTE-Advanced enables greater data download speeds throughout the network, thereby improving application coverage (app coverage) by aggregating spectrum across the available bands.
When SK Telecom launches the upgraded LTE-Advanced service commercially – planned for the second half of 2014 – it states that subscribers will be able to download an 800MB movie in just 28 seconds, significantly faster than other networks. Measured at their maximum speeds, downloading the same movie file via 3G, LTE, and the existing LTE-Advanced (10MHz+10MHz) would take 7 minutes and 24 seconds, 1 minute and 25 seconds, and 43 seconds, respectively.
Per Narvinger, Head of Product Line LTE at Ericsson, says: “We are very pleased that we, in our close partnership with SK Telecom, have now demonstrated our product readiness of Carrier Aggregation beyond 20MHz. We are now looking forward to the market ramp of Carrier Aggregation and the global adoption of this capability as global chipset vendors and the end to end ecosystem complete their readiness for commercial launch.”
Ericsson supports the deployment of LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation on other spectrum bands in South Korea, enabling operators to offer higher data speeds throughout the network, thereby improving application coverage.
Ericsson is the market leader in LTE. Today, 50 percent of the world’s LTE smartphone traffic is served by Ericsson networks, which is more than double the traffic of our closest competitor. More than 180 LTE RAN and Evolved Packet Core networks have been delivered worldwide, of which more than 110 have gone live commercially.
