SK Telecom has announced plans to build additional 1.8GHz base stations to secure nationwide coverage for its LTE and LTE-Advanced networks by the end of this year. Operator has already built a nationwide LTE network using 10MHz in the 800MHz frequency band in April, 2012.

According to SK Telecom, the nationwide rollout of this 20MHz LTE will provide the company with an important edge in deploying nationwide “20MHz (1.8GHz) + 10MHz (800MHz)” LTE-Advanced network that offers up to 225Mbps of speed.

Te company also said that it gained approval to use 10MHz bandwidth in the 2.1GHz band for LTE. The company secured 30MHz bandwidth in the 2.1GHz band through a frequency auction in 2010.

With the newly added 10 MHz LTE bandwidth in the 2.1GHz band, SK Telecom now has LTE bandwidth in three different frequency bands – i.e. 10MHz in 800MHz band, 20MHz in 1.8GHz band and 10MHz in 2.1GHz band – thus moving one step closer to realizing LTE-Advanced tri-band carrier aggregation technology that supports up to 300Mbps.

SK Telecom will begin building base stations for LTE in the 2.1GHz band in the second quarter of 2014, making the network available for commercialization as soon as the supporting handsets come to market.