Korean carrier to launch 300 Mbps LTE-Advanced network later this year

[Shawn Knight]

Mobile Internet has already eclipsed home broadband speeds in some parts of the world and it only looks to get even faster moving forward. SK Telecom in Korea has announced plans to roll out a blazing fast 300 Mbps service later this year following the launch of a 150 Mbps LTE-Advanced network in mid-2013.

To put things into perspective, regular LTE offers around 75 Mbps while most home connections are even much slower than that. Only a few providers offer 300 Mbps in the home (Verizon FiOS, for example) but expect to pay a lot for such services – that is, if they are offered in your area at all.

To reach 300 Mbps over mobile, SK Telecom had to aggregate two different frequency bands together. Specifically, they used a 20MHz bandwidth in 1.8GHz band and a 10MHz bandwidth in 800MHz band to make it happen. But just what sort of benefit does such a fast network offer to the average user?

According to the telecom, it would take 7 minutes and 24 seconds to download an 800MB movie using 3G, 43 seconds over regular LTE-Advanced and just 22 seconds using 3Band LTE-A (the name for the 300 Mbps service).

The company plans to showcase the new technology at the 3GSM event next month in Barcelona. The service will be available to customers starting in late 2014 for new smartphones, tablets and PCs equipped with special hardware.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/55389-korean-carrier-to-launch-300-mbps-lte-advanced-network-later-this-year.html

 

[SirGCal]

And Time Warner's super-awesome 'Turbo' lineup is still limited to 30M/5M in my area... Weeee... I work from home and with that, I need (mostly upload also) speed. I want fiber bad. Or at least something like this. As long as I can get an unlimited flavor.

 

[psycros]

Does no one on this site understand how wireless broadband actually works? You will not get 7.5 megabytes per second down on LTE *ever*. You'll be lucky to get half that most of the time. This isn't difficult information to find. However, the writer is correct about wireless being faster than home broadband in many areas, because a few miles beyond the suburbs there IS no terrestrial internet.

 

[complexxL9]

That is nice and all, but we in Lithuania already have 300mbps
http://internetas.zebra.lt/sviesolaidinis-internetas
And it costs 69.90 LTL a month (that is roughly 27.44 US Dollars).
Though I am perfectly fine with my 100mbps, I guess that is one of not so many advantages of living in this country

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

3G is still fine by me. I'm in no hurry to spend more.

 

[Bubbajim]

Does no one on this site understand how wireless broadband actually works? You will not get 7.5 megabytes per second down on LTE *ever*. You'll be lucky to get half that most of the time. This isn't difficult information to find.

Source please? Indoors in my office building, with only 2 bars of signal I just ran a speed test and got 23mb/s down, 11 up on my Nexus 5. At home it's roughly 30-40% better than both of those numbers too. 4G/LTE are great.

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

Does no one on this site understand how wireless broadband actually works? You will not get 7.5 megabytes per second down on LTE *ever*. You'll be lucky to get half that most of the time. This isn't difficult information to find.

Source please? Indoors in my office building, with only 2 bars of signal I just ran a speed test and got 23mb/s down, 11 up on my Nexus 5. At home it's roughly 30-40% better than both of those numbers too. 4G/LTE are great.

I think you guys have your measures mixed up. Data transmission speeds are measured in megabits, (Mbps) while file size is measured in Megabytes, (MB) A byte is 8 times as much as a bit, so when Psycros says that 7.5 megabytes per second is faster than you'll ever see, I assume he means you'll never download 7.5 MB in 1 second because that would take a speed of 60 Mbps. A speed of 7.5 Mpbs would give you less than 1MB per second, and that's not very fast at all.

Notice the story above says with 300 Mbps you'll be able to download an 800 MB file in 22 seconds. 300 mega bits of speed divided by 8 is 37.5 MB/s. and if you downloaded 37.5 MB/s for 22 seconds you'd have 825 MB.

Why they don't just use one measure, I'll don't know, but it is confusing. And I think Psycros is also right about the actual speed. I think those speed measures are like gas mileage. best case scenarios and probably not realistic depending on your proximity to a tower, buildings, trees, and whether you're inside or now.

 

[9Nails]

That's fast. I'm pretty sure that my SD Card isn't able to keep up with write speeds that quick. So my phone would be a bottle neck for the bandwidth. But then, I don't live where there's 300 Mbps connection speeds, so darn!