South Korea SK Teleconm and LG Uplus are rolling out faster LTE wireless networks tomorrow

Tweet 1. Korea Times - SK Telecom (No. 1 mobile carrier in South Korea) is launching LTE service in South Korea. SK Telecom LTE will provide a maximum downlink speed of 75 Mbps, which is five times faster than that of the 3G WCDMA network, and 1.9 times faster than WiBro. SK Telecom plans to launch a high-quality video call service on LTE smartphones that offers images eight times clearer and twice clear voice clarity, as its LTE network enhances the speed of a video call from 64 Kbps to over 500 Kbps. SK Telecom promised to offer a high-quality LTE-based voice service and widen coverage as it has 1,720 base stations in Seoul, which is far higher than around 500 of Uplus in Seoul and three other major cities. SK Telecom also plans to release two LTE tablets in October. The company expects the number of its LTE subscribers to soar to 10 million by 2015 from an estimated 300,000 this year.

``The migration toward LTE doesn’t mean that SK would drop WiBro networks. We are using WiBro as back-up networks. LG Electronics will introduce LTE-WiBro handsets and models supporting both WCDMA and WiBro will also be released,’’ said Bae.

2. SK Telecom will expand for coverage nationwide by 2013. SK plans to invest more than 2 trillion won ($1.9 billion) on LTE by 2014.



LG Uplus CEO Lee Sang-chul said it will surpass SK Telecom in terms of LTE subscribers from 2014 as it aims to secure 10 million LTE customers within the next three years. Uplus won the exclusive right to use a higher frequency mobile band of 2.1 GHz from the nation’s telecom regulator

Another Korean company KT Corp plans to launch a 4G service in November.

I had some wireless and fixed line communication speed predictions from 2006.

Wireless superbroadband (50-1000Mbps)           2009-2012

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