SK Telecom has announced new era of "LTE 2.0" defined by innovative LTE services including High-quality communication services,  lifestyle-enhancing LTE services and industrial productivity-improving solutions. Operator plans to commercialize high quality VoLTE service in the third quarter of 2012 and intends to commercialize 150 Mbps LTE-A network technology in the second half of 2013 with commercialization of Carrier Aggregation (CA).

The operator claims that it is now world's second largest LTE service provider in just a year since launching commercial LTE service in July 2011 and expects to surpass 3.4 million LTE subscribers by the end of June. Based on the rapid growth rate of LTE subscribers, it expects the number of cumulative LTE subscribers to exceed 7 million by the end of 2012.

The company said it will lead LTE network evolution by covering 99% of the population with its LTE network by June and will commercialize Multi Carrier (MC) on July 1. It will utilize both its existing 800MHz frequency band and the 1.8GHz band it newly acquired in the second half of last year. With an additional 20MHz uplink/downlink spectrum, it will be using a total of 40MHz for its LTE services.

Operator plans to lead communication service innovation in an all-IP environment where voice and data are integrated. It will be introducing Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Rich Communication Suite (RCS) to provide customers with high quality call and messaging services. According to operator, compared to the existing 3G voice call, it offers up to 2.2 times better sound quality and twice faster call connection speed (requires less than 0.3 ~ 2.5 seconds of call connecting time).

Moreover, SK Telecom is also stepping up efforts to commercialize RCS service, chosen as the direction of evolution of mobile communications by worldwide mobile carriers. RCS is a service that enables integrated use of features like voice call, SMS, chatting, file-sharing through diverse networks and devices. It will first integrate its messaging services such as SMS into an RCS service and provide differentiated service quality leveraging reliability and stability, the core strengths of mobile carriers, and plans to develop RCS into a next-generation integrated communication platform by expanding RCS-capable devices, securing fixed-mobile interworking, and converging RCS with HD Voice and other new services. 

The company plans to launch its RCS service in the second half of this year after building a detailed service structure and billing systems.