South Korea's wireless operator SK Telecom has debuted the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) service through smartphones. To commercialize LTE-A, SK Telecom has already applied Carrier Aggregation (CA) and Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP), and plans to apply Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) in 2014.

SK Telecom's LTE-A, launched today, covers the entire Seoul, central areas of 42 cities in Gyeonggi-do and Chungcheong-do, and 103 university areas. Furthermore, the company will gradually expand its LTE-A coverage to 84 cities across the nation.

Operator says that LTE-A offers ultra-fast network speeds of up to 150 Mbps and with the commercialization of LTE-A, the company expects to further improve customer satisfaction in mobile Internet services.

SK Telecom announced that its existing LTE price plans will apply to the LTE-A service and has released Samsung's 'Galaxy S4 LTE-A.' The Samsung device, a phone optimized to work over LTE-A network.

SK Telecom had launched 4G LTE in 2011 and successfully commercialized the Multi Carrier (MC) technology in July 2012. In March, SK Telecom has launched aggressive plans to expand the coverage of MC base stations to 200 university areas and central areas of 84 cities nationwide. The company has built a total of 20,000 RU (Radio Units) as of June 2013. With MC in place, the company can easily evolve the network to LTE-A s through simple software upgrades.