Make Your Broadband ISP Cry with 300Mbps LTE-Advanced This Year (Korea Only)

[dgstorm]

How would you like to make your broadband ISP cry by switching to wireless service which blows them away in speeds. If you live in South Korea, you might be able to do that this year. SK Telecom will be deploying LTE-Advanced wireless internet service in that country later this year. This new service will offer speeds up to 300Mbps!

Back in January of 2011, we shared a report discussing the then-future LTE-Advanced technology being tested in Korea. In fact, in that article the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) board in Korea anticipated that some form of LTE-Advanced would deploy by 2014. While the full potential of their 600Mbps theoretical speeds from back then will not yet be realized, the 300 Mbps is still a magnificent achievement.

The technology being deployed by SK Telecom uses LTE-Advanced 3-band carrier aggregation tech. This basically combines one 20MHz band of spectrum with two 10MHz bands, allowing these insanely high wireless speeds. Of course, the carrier is sitting still on this either. Even though their plan is to deploy the tech sometime this year, they are also working on even faster LTE-Advanced which will offer consumers 450Mbps speeds.

This leaves only one burning question... when will we get this awesome tech in Europe and North America?

Source: Engadget

 

[FoxKat]

We're so in last place anymore. It sucks to see the Asian and European countries beating us to the new technology, especially when the US was the leader in the world at one point... Now we're just the junior league.

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[jspradling7]

European countries aren't out pacing us, they are behind us now and fading. I'm happy for the Koreans and I'm glad they are advancing because we will benefit from it too. The United States paid a heavy price to keep South Korea from becoming a North Korea. It's good to see them succeed.

 

[MissionImprobable]

European countries aren't out pacing us, they are behind us now and fading. I'm happy for the Koreans and I'm glad they are advancing because we will benefit from it too. The United States paid a heavy price to keep South Korea from becoming a North Korea. It's good to see them succeed.

Painting it with a broad stroke, European and Asian countries have tended to be far ahead of us when it comes to mobile tech and broadband speeds, but a big part of that is in how consumer dollars are spent. For instance, other than technophiles here, buying new phones and such every six months is a rarity. In countries where big expenditures like automobiles aren't essential, there is a lot of surplus cash to dump into that market, and so they do remain ahead quite often. High MP cell phones and higher mobile and standard broadband speeds have been realities there for quite sometime. The cost per Mbps speed increase in most of those countries is also quite a bit lower. The 25 or so Mbps speeds that we love so much here have been the norm overseas in developed areas for a while.

Again, the markets are very much different. Let's not even talk about the surplus billions that are made in the Korean mobile and online gaming market =p Makes me wish I had gotten in on that one.

 

[FoxKat]

European countries aren't out pacing us, they are behind us now and fading. I'm happy for the Koreans and I'm glad they are advancing because we will benefit from it too. The United States paid a heavy price to keep South Korea from becoming a North Korea. It's good to see them succeed.

Don't get me wrong... I don't beget them success. It's one thing to have another country rise to success through hard work and education. But the US is tanking in the global ranks every year. We may be the most powerful military force (though that is questionable too), but we are fast losing our competitive edge in technology and education.

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[kodiak799]

It's also logistically much easier to roll-out/upgrade a country the size of Kentucky.

 

[xeene]

European countries aren't out pacing us, they are behind us now and fading. I'm happy for the Koreans and I'm glad they are advancing because we will benefit from it too. The United States paid a heavy price to keep South Korea from becoming a North Korea. It's good to see them succeed.

Sweden, Denmark and Germany have a lot faster lte speeds at a fraction of the cost. You can get 100mbps speeds in Sweden and only pay $0.63 per Gb a month. USA is in 8th place in the world in lte speeds, even Canada has us beat.

 

[jspradling7]

Sweden, Denmark and Germany have a lot faster lte speeds at a fraction of the cost. You can get 100mbps speeds in Sweden and only pay $0.63 per Gb a month. USA is in 8th place in the world in lte speeds, even Canada has us beat.

Doh, Sorry. I was recalling recent articles concerning the situation in the UK and wrongfully applied it to Europe. Bonehead comment. My bad.

 

[jspradling7]

Don't get me wrong... I don't beget them success. It's one thing to have another country rise to success through hard work and education. But the US is tanking in the global ranks every year. We may be the most powerful military force (though that is questionable too), but we are fast losing our competitive edge in technology and education.

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True. I wonder how much government money goes into the wireless networks in those countries with better service than the US.

 

[droidbionicmaster]

With speeds like that carrier will need to bring back unlimited ppl will burn through that so fast.

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[FoxKat]

With speeds like that carrier will need to bring back unlimited ppl will burn through that so fast.

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That's an interesting observation. True that if speeds are faster the web pages will load quicker, and that could translate into more surfing from the phone due to its faster access, however I think there's a point where using the web directly maxes out, and it becomes more what is using the web on behalf of you in the background that takes the lead in data consumption. I mean, to watch a move at 4G or at the speeds they're talking about will change nothing...the movie will still be the same amount of data, and it will consume that amount of data over the same +/- 2 hour timeframe. What will change is the reduced (or eliminated), stutters and pixelation that happens when data isn't being transmitted in sufficient rate of speed. Of course, what could also ultimately change here is the type of quality of video, perhaps moving from 720P to 1080P, or from there to 4K. Again, I think the quality maxes out as well given the screen size and resolution and what the eye can perceive as quality (resolution versus the eye's ability to differentiate between HD and 4K at those screen sizes).

In other words, unless the user is directly downloading numerous movies for later viewing or archiving, or deliberately collecting large quantities of MP3 or lower to no-compression audio, or they are in some other way directly requesting large amounts of data for some purpose (in which case they can consume much larger quantities over the same time-frame and therefore may be more aggressive in doing so), they will likely use about the same on this new faster service as they are on 4G now. They'll take the same number of photos and videos, which will be stored to the cloud in the same amount of data transmission - faster, yes, but the same number of bits...

Of course, as data becomes faster (and hopefully cheaper), the app designers will likely take more and more advantage of this and start more aggressively migrating portions (or in some cases all), of their app processes to the cloud instead, and eventually the smartphone will operate more like a dumb terminal to achieve the best balance between speed and responsiveness, as well as to limit the amount of data actually stored on the device with its finite storage capacity. Also, games would likely become even more realistic and the background information (textures, colors, definition, realism), would become an even greater priority, which would ultimately consume more transmission data. I could see the backdrops and scenery of video games moving from raster and vector imagery and more to real video of actual physical locations, and that video data being streamed from cloud servers to the phone rather than being created on-board, which would of course consume massively more data, but be less intensive for the phone and processor(s)/coprocessor(s) to reproduce.

Where I see the increased speed *(beyond what we already have which is suitably fast now), affecting the actual quantity of data - increasing the overall quantity is mostly in the background services such as Facebook, Twitter, other social media (which is becoming more and more dynamic with videos and high resolution photos), and more intensive, more detailed imagery in navigation, more interaction with the surroundings, such as when you're traveling and near a store, and the store advertisement is sent to you based on your location, and other things of that nature.

 

[kodiak799]

Yeah, faster speeds =/= more data...but faster speeds might lead to increased use which results in more data. I also have several apps downloading articles/RSS for offline use (Currents, GReader, etc..), because I have unlimited and can. I hardly need to, and actually I have it set to download only on wifi plugged in to conserve battery. But I do it so I never forget to have something to read on the airplane or subway.

Now with that kind of bandwidth, maybe they would offer cheaper unlimited shared data. But that brings us back to the fact that the wireless towers only connect us to the pipes, most of which are owned by broadband providers. So when people inevitably drop home broadband because they can....well the broadband providers aren't just going to say "well played" and go bankrupt.

 

[droidbionicmaster]

From what people i have talk to 4G uses twice the data then 3G. Like skype video idr the amount i will throw number that are close. On 3G a 30 min chat takes like 200 mb where on 4G it like 400 mb. Remember just random numbers im throwing out. Plus if the do volte i would guess calls will use ur data. That where cell company screw you to the wall. They know ppl need cell phones and if u go over data they know you will pay for more data. Lucky me im unlimited. Ill never give it up

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[kodiak799]

Some apps like Skype and Netflix might transmit 720p if you have the faster LTE connection, but generally the data amount doesn't change over LTE vs 3G...a 20meg file received in your gmail doesn't magically become 40megs over LTE.

VoLTE would use much less data (assuming they count it as data rather than voice minutes) than Pandora, depends on compression but talking maybe 11MB/hour - you'd have to talk 3 hours a day to ring-up 1gig of data in a month.