SK Telecom's new LTE-Advanced 4G service in South Korea is growing at a rapid clip, with more than 350,000 users signed up in total in August.
Light Reading checked in with SK Telecom (Nasdaq: SKM) last week about the numbers for the service. "The latest subscriber figures for SK Telecom's LTE-Advanced is 350,000 as of August 7, 2013," a company spokeswoman told us via email.
This suggests that SKT could be adding around 50,000 subscribers a week to the service.
SKT launched LTE-Advanced on June 26 of this year. The operator says that the service can achieve maximum downloads of 150 Mbit/s through advanced features, such as bonding two radio channels to get additional bandwidth.
Why this matters This is first 4G service in the world being marketed as LTE-Advanced, though it doesn't yet implement all the features of that specification. Other carriers are likely to be watching what new features and services over LTE-A work, or don't, for SKT.
Sadly, the ads for the LTE-A service aren't any better than other mobile offerings the world over though:
For more
- SK Telecom Adds 300K LTE-Advanced Subs
- SK Telecom Deploys LTE-A With Ericsson
- Korean Ops Do LTE-A With NSN
- SK Telecom Debuts LTE-Advanced
- Why You Should Care About LTE-Advanced (Eventually)
— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading