While Americans are just now starting to discover the benefits of 4G cellular speeds--and infrastructure-challenged nations like India are still discovering 3G—South Korea is already onto the next advance in mobile Internet connectivity.
SK Telecom (News - Alert) has recently finished construction of the world’s first commercially available LTE-Advanced network. While 3G delivers theoretical speeds of up to 15 Mbps and 4G trumps that with up to 75 Mbps, LTE (News - Alert)-Advanced blows both out of the water by delivering a theoretical 150 Mbps.
Yes, you heard that right: 150 Mbps.
To put that into perspective, a user who downloads an 800 MB movie using LTE-A can expect to get his file in as little as 43 seconds.
SK Telecom has built the LTE-A network by combining two 10 MHz components carriers to form an effective bandwidth of 20 MHz spectrum bands. It also already applies Carrier Aggregation (CA (News - Alert)) and Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP) to its network, and it plans to apply Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) in 2014.
The company launched aggressive plans to expand the coverage of MC base stations to 200 university areas and central areas of 84 cities nationwide in March. It has built a total of 20,000 RU (Radio Units) as of June, 2013. With MC in place, the company can evolve the network to LTE-A through simple software upgrades.
According to the company, it now covers the entirety of Seoul, central areas of 42 cities in Gyeonggi-do, as well as Chungcheong-do and 103 university areas. The company will gradually expand its LTE-A coverage to 84 cities across the nation.
The network advance does little good if no device can take advantage of the speed, which is why South Korea’s Samsung (News - Alert) has released the first LTE-A capable smartphone in conjunction with SK’s network upgrade.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE-A is the world’s first smartphone capable of leveraging LTE-A, and it will hit Korean stores some time later this summer, according to the company.
The Galaxy S4 LTE-A is similar to the regular Galaxy S4, but with a few modifications. It sports an upgraded GPU, the 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon chipset, and of course the LTE-Advanced radio. It still features the same 13MP camera, 2GB of RAM (News - Alert), Android 4.2.2 software, as well as all of that Samsung proprietary software.
Some have argued that 150 Mbps is more than anyone needs, but that’s just because nobody has had such mobile Internet speeds to this point. Like hard drives and highways, the larger they get, the more they are used. With 150 Mbps, developers can do tricks that most of us haven’t even imagined yet but will consider essential in a few years.
Edited by Blaise McNamee