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:
pzernik, User Rank: Light Sabre 9/10/2013 | 2:54:02 PM
Re: Nice ad! LTE-A is a big win-win for device vendors, infrastructure providers and the general public. As for the carriers, LTE seems to be a never-ending money pit! How could the be getting good ROI when the "I" keeps growing and growing....Now I see why they skimp in the AD department...
Impact on business users? I wonder what difference services such as LTE-A, and the truly superfast fiber broadband access services available in S Korea, are having on enterprise strategies.
LTE was exciting operators such as NTT because of the low latency that would make mobile broadband connectivity much more suitable for enterprise applications (much more than 3G, thatr is), and i wonder if that view has been borne out.
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