SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest mobile carrier, said Wednesday it has successfully demonstrated a faster data transmission technology which utilizes existing bands for Long Term Evolution.

The Korean telecom firm used the 4X4 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output technology developed by Nokia Networks and carrier aggregation which combine different bands to realize a 600 Mbps data transmission rate.

The 4X4 MIMO utilizes four transmitting antennas and four receiving antennas for communication between a mobile device and a base station, while the existing LTE technology requires only two transmitting antennas and two receiving antennas.

 

By simply adding more antennas, the company was able to double the maximum downlink speed of the LTE using 10 MHz bandwidth, from 75 Mbps to 150 Mbps.

To demonstrate the 600 Mbps data transmission speeds, the Korea mobile carrier and Nokia first realized 300 Mbps data rates by applying 4X4 MIMO technology to a contiguous 20 MHz block of spectrum. The two counterparts then aggregated two of the 20 MHz bandwidths with the carrier aggregation technology.

The data speed of 600 Mbps is eight times faster than that of LTE, and four times faster than LTE-A, which makes use of two 10 MHz bands, and two times faster than tri-band LTE-A ― currently the fastest mobile network, using a 20 MHz band, two 10MHz bands.

“This successful demonstration of 4X4 MIMO technology not only strengthens our competitiveness in LTE-A, but also marks another milestone in our journey towards achieving the next-generation network,” said Park Jin-hyo, senior vice president and head of the network technology R&D center at SK Telecom.

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