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.