While expectations are high for the Galaxy S7 and G5, the new flagship smartphones of Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, respectively, an announcement by mobile carrier SK Telecom on Monday offers hints to a new feature on the handsets.
SK Telecom employees work at a laboratory of the firm in Seoul. (SKT)
Korea’s leading mobile carrier said that it would deploy an advanced uplink carrier aggregation technology, which will increase the upload speed of the long-term evolution network, up to fourfold, in the first half of this year in Korea.
With the current LTE network, mobile users can upload a file at a speed of 25Mbps on the 10 MHz band.
“When the new mobile network technology is up and running, the maximum upload speed, in theory, can reach 100 Mbps,” an SKT public relations representative said.
Since the faster upload technology is incompatible with the existing smartphones, it is anticipated that the Galaxy S7 and the G5 will become the first handsets sporting the faster network technology.
Both handsets will be unveiled during the Mobile World Congress trade show to be held in Barcelona in February.
The deployment of the advanced uplink CA technology is inevitable in order to cope with explosive data traffic growth due to streaming services, multichannel networks, and social media, SKT explained.
SKT’s network division head Lee Jong-bong said in a statement, “SKT will continue to take the technology lead in the looming 5G era.”
At the core of the upload technology is the UL 64QAM, which improves efficiency in transitioning data into LTE signals, and the MC-PUSCH, which combines disparate frequencies in the same spectrum into one frequency, according to the mobile carrier.
The recent completion of the standardization works of the UL 64QAM and MC-PUSCH by global mobile carriers and network equipment developers sped up the commercialization of the uplink CA, according to the Korean network operator.
The new mobile network technology will be first commercialized in Seoul and its adjacent regions and metropolitan cities by February, and expanded to other regions down the road.
By Kim Young-won (
wone0102@heraldcorp.com)
