SK Telecom's LTE-A pipeline will support 225Mbps speeds before the year is out

In June, Korea's SK Telecom was the first carrier to introduce LTE-A to its customers. That was matched by the mobile operator's two biggest rivals by the time September rolled around. Now, SK Telecom is about to take LTE-A to the next level. By combining 20MHz bandwidth in the 1.8GHz band with 10MHz in the 800MHz band, SK Telecom will be able to offer its customers data speeds as high as 225Mbps. 

To put this in perspective, a plain ol' ordinary LTE network can reach top speeds of 75Mbps, and an LTE-A pipeline can move data around at 150Mbps. But SK Telecom has successfully used carrier aggregation to reach the faster 225Mbps speeds. And once chipsets are developed that support these speeds, the service will be offered to customers. This is expected to take place in the second half of this year.

At the faster speeds, an 800MB movie will take just 28 seconds to load. Over LTE-A, that same film will take 43 seconds to download. Over LTE and 3G, the download times are 1 minute and 25 seconds and 7 minutes and 24 seconds respectively.

And wait, there's more. If 20MHz + 10MHz can provide customers with speeds up to 225Mbps, adding another band using carrier aggregation (20MHz +10MHz+10MHz) can provide data speeds as fast as 300Mbps. Think about how fast you can get things done with your data traveling that fast. And the Korean carrier isn't even done there. It is looking at using four and five band LTE for even faster data speeds, although there is no word when this might take place.
 

source: SKTelecom