BARCELONA, SPAIN— SK Telecom (NYSE:SKM) grabbed the eyes of the world’s leading telecom companies participating in MWC 2012 by announcing a great leap forward in global LTE technology.
Byun Jae-Woan, CTO and Head of Corporate R&D Group of SK Telecom, held a luncheon meeting on February 28 in Barcelona, Spain. He said that at this year’s MWC, SK Telecom demonstrated its 100Mbps data rate by seamlessly integrating LTE and Wi-Fi networks. Using Hybrid Network technology, the company will keep developing more innovative network technologies to effectively handle surging data traffic and maintain its technological leadership.
Byun started by explaining SK Telecom plans to further enhance Advanced-SCAN [2]. The company developed this technology for the first time in the world, in November 2011 and commercialized in January 2012 to expand capacity and improve quality of networks. Advanced-SCAN will be upgraded to control signal interference in base stations with poor signal quality and boundary areas between sectors of base stations. By doing so, will enable customers to experience greater speed and high quality data service anywhere, anytime.
Moreover, he revealed the company’s plans to commercialize Carrier Aggregation in 2013. This would become the world’s first to commercialize Carrier Aggregation [3], a spectrum operating technology with which a mobile operator can satisfy the large bandwidth demand through combined use of two or more different frequency bands.
The company is also planning to become the first in Korea to commercialize Multi Carrier by launching the technology within this year. Multi Carrier allows mobile operators to balance the load across multiple carriers, thereby enhancing the overall wireless communications speed.
Byun also said that SK Telecom will further advance Hybrid Network, which was highly received at this year’s MWC. The Network can accelerate to speeds of 60Mbps or faster via simultaneous use of 3G and Wi-Fi networks by the second half of 2012. To ensure 100Mbps of wireless speeds it will commercialize a LTE + Wi-Fi network integration solution in 2013.
He added that SK Telecom will work to constantly improve data transmission speed by increasing the number of LTE Hot Zones using LTE Femto (or Wi-Fi Integrated LTE Femtocell), a technology it developed for the first time in order to minimize shadow areas including indoors and underground.
Byun stressed that with SK Telecom’s Hybrid Network and LTE Femto, customers will be able to experience a data service of much greater quality, speed and stability.
Byun closed by saying that the company is also working to develop Uplink CoMP[4] technology ahead of others with the goal to gain the leadership position in the LTE era. Uplink CoMP is a cutting-edge technology where multiple base stations receive signals from handsets to improve the signal quality, thereby offering a high-quality data service. .
Byun Jae-Woan, CTO and Head of Corporate R&D Group of SK Telecom said, “As the company that successfully operated multiple networks - including CDMA, WCDMA, Wibro, etc. - with a strong technological capability over the last 28 years, SK Telecom is committed to continue providing the world’s top network quality in the era of LTE, where the focus is on data services. Furthermore, looking forward, SK Telecom will sustain its leadership position in the LTE-A era as well by developing and applying more innovative technologies capable of delivering data service of the highest quality.”
