SEOUL, KOREA - The number of Long Term Evolution–A (LTE-A) users has increased since the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 phone, which was the first to provide LTE-A service. Numerous advertisements and promotional events have been touting that the speed of LTE-A doubles that of LTE, captivating consumers.
However, many argue that the actual speed of LTE-A is not as impressive as it sounds. This is the result of the traffic increasing far quicker than the speed of technology development. To solve this, experts suggest that technical development needs to be able to deal with a rapidly increasing traffic speed. Not only that, additional frequency ranges should be also secured.
According to the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, wireless traffic in Korea exceeded 70,000 terabyte (TB) last May. Of these, the LTE traffic accounted for 62 percent, at 44,497 TB. In May of last year when Korea’s three telecommunication companies built a nationwide LTE network, the LTE traffic was at just 10,578 TB. Thus, the traffic gap between LTE and LTE-A has increased four times while the speed gap between the two has increased only two times. This explains why LTE users are experiencing at low speed, less than half of its maximum potential.
The theory that the rate of mobile data traffic is always faster than expected has generally been accepted by people in the telecommunication world. An executive member of the board at SK Telecom said that “SK has yielded traffic estimations, taking previous traffic increase rates and new device release schedules into account, but actual traffic has outpaced estimations.” “It seems that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the traffic increase rate” and “it is better for telecommunication companies to focus on developing wireless networks,” he says.
There is a possibility for the improvement of traffic at sensible speeds. Experts say that the commercialization of carrier aggregation (CA) technology and frequency aggregation technology makes it possible to keep up with rapidly increasing traffic. In addition, if the frequency aggregation technology service that simultaneously aggregates three frequencies is successful, the wireless internet speed will become six times faster than LTE and three times than LTE-A.
