SK Telecom Applies Technology Bundling 5 LTE Frequencies, Unique in Korea
40% Faster Than Current LTE, Evolving to 1Gbps-Class Service Next Year

'5-Band CA' technology, called the final evolutionary stage of LTE service, is being commercialized.

SK Telecom announced that it is applying '5-Band CA' technology to the Galaxy S8, which bundles 5 LTE frequencies into a single frequency to increase data transmission speed and performance. When this technology is applied, it achieves data transmission speeds of around 700Mbps, which is 9 times faster than early LTE and 40% faster than the current LTE maximum speed of 500Mbps, according to the company.

The international standards body 3GPP standardized key elements such as 5-band CA frequency combinations in 'LTE-A Pro Release 14,' the final stage of LTE. SK Telecom's 4.5G service core features—a combination of 3~5-band CA, 4x4 multiple antenna (MIMO; Multi Input Multi Output), and 256QAM—are also 3GPP standard technologies.

SK Telecom's Choi Seung-won, Head of Infrastructure Strategy Division, said, "If early LTE, which started with 10MHz bandwidth, is compared to a single-lane road, the 4.5G with '5-Band CA' applied can be likened to a '7-lane LTE autobahn' utilizing a total of 70MHz width." In other words, the time to download an HD movie (based on 2GB) to a smartphone has been significantly reduced from 3 minutes 38 seconds with early LTE to 23 seconds through 4.5G service.

SK Telecom plans to commercialize around 800Mbps-class 4.5G service next month and around 900Mbps-class service in the second half of the year, aiming to provide gigabit-class 4.5G service by combining 4/5-band CA with 4x4 multiple antenna (MIMO) after the first half of next year. To this end, 4.5G core technologies such as 5-band CA, 4x4 multiple antenna, and 256QAM are being applied to base stations nationwide.

SK Telecom plans to provide 4.5G service in major areas of 23 cities nationwide including Seoul and metropolitan cities by the end of next month and in major areas of 85 cities by the first half of the year, with plans to continue expanding coverage thereafter.

'AI Network' Service Improving Network Performance

In addition, SK Telecom disclosed cases of 'AI Network' service and its future evolution direction. 'AI Network' is a new initiative in which artificial intelligence participates in network performance improvement to always provide customers with the best quality.

A representative function of 'AI Network' is to analyze big data generated from base stations across the country to optimize communication quality such as antenna direction and coverage in real-time, and to preemptively predict and resolve quality change factors such as traffic surges on its own. This function repeats learning and prediction through Machine Learning and has the strength of continuous evolution. SK Telecom applied 'AI Network' to its commercial network in December last year and is preparing to advance it in the near future by additionally linking big data such as real-time perceived quality indices.

Additionally, SK Telecom plans to apply 'Intelligent Spam Filtering' technology to 'AI Network' within the year to block increasingly unpredictable spam and malware.

Park Jin-hyo, Network Manager, said, "Artificial intelligence continuously analyzes spam text and images and learns patterns to continuously improve spam detection accuracy. In addition, SK Telecom is accelerating the development of next-generation 'AI Network' technologies such as 'Orchestration,' where artificial intelligence learns customer and service characteristics on its own to provide customized networks for each customer."