SK Telecom, the country’s biggest mobile carrier in Korea, plans to launch a mobile service next year that provides faster connection speeds than the existing Long Term Evolution network.

Holding a press meeting at the company’s office in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, Thursday, the telecommunications firm demonstrated the new network technology, which is three times faster than LTE.

The mobile service, called “two-band LTE,” uses carrier aggregation technology, through which the firm aggregates a 20 MHz bandwidth in the 1.8 GHz band with a 10 MHz bandwidth in the 800 MHz band to offer speeds of up to 225 Mbps.

As the technology is only compatible with smartphones equipped with a certain chipset, it is not expected to be commercialized until the second half of next year, according to the company.

Samsung Electronics’ upcoming Galaxy S5 is thought to be among the smartphones that will support the faster network service.

Users can download an 800 MB movie file in just 28 seconds, much faster than the LTE and LTE-Advanced network services, at 1 minute 25 seconds and 43 seconds, respectively.

SK unveiled the carrier aggregation technology in April, and was the world’s first telecom firm to commercialize an LTE-A service in June.

“Successful demonstration of 225 Mbps LTE-Advanced will help SK Telecom realize more innovative network technologies, which will also lead to the growth of relevant industries including devices, content and convergence fields,” said Choi Jin-sung, executive vice president and head of ICT R&D at SK Telecom, noting that the firm would be well prepared for an anticipated exponential increase in mobile traffic.

The telecom firm said it would also soon realize “three-band LTE,” which will provide speeds of up to 300 Mbps.

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)