SK Telecom has successfully tested LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) five-band carrier aggregation (CA) on its commercial network. SK Telecom’s bandwidth resources as of February 2017 are 10MHz bandwidth in the 800MHz band, 20MHz bandwidth in the 1.8GHz band, 10MHz bandwidth in the 2.1GHz band, 10MHz + 20 MHz bandwidths in the 2.6Ghz band.

Since June 1, 2016, SK Telecom has been providing 500Mbps LTE-A Pro service by applying 256 QAM technology to its tri-band LTE-A CA network. Also, the company has acquired additional spectrum in the 2.6GHz band in May 2017, securing the basis for LTE-A five-band CA.

In addition, SK Telecom has successfully demonstrated the application of MIMO to its tri-band CA network, thereby securing the capability to provide 900Mbps data speeds.

With the application of 4X4 MIMO - a technology that doubles the transmission speed - to a 20MHz bandwidth of a frequency band, users will be able to download data at maximum rate of 400Mbps per frequency band.

SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics are demonstrating this LTE-A Pro technology at Samsung booth during the MWC period, and plan to commercialize it within the first half of 2017.

Meanwhile, SK Telecom also announced that it, together with Ericsson, successfully demonstrated Licensed Assisted Access (LAA), the technology that uses unlicensed spectrum together with licensed spectrum for 4G LTE radio communication. By aggregating up to 80MHz in licensed and unlicensed spectrum and applying 4X4 MIMO technology, peak data rates of 1Gbps is achievable. The two companies are demonstrating the technology at Ericsson booth during MWC 2017.