SEOUL, Oct 16 LG Uplus Corp., the smallest mobile carrier in South Korea, said Thursday it has developed a new technology that combines WiFi (wireless fidelity) frequency with the long-term evolution (LTE) network to boost the speed of data transmission.
The “LTE in unlicensed spectrum” technology, or LTE-U, lets smart devices using the existing frequency band of the WiFi network to combine it with that of the LTE network for transmission speeds of up to four times that of existing LTE, the mobile carrier said.
LG Uplus said it recorded a download speed of 300 megabits per second (Mbps) by adding the WiFi network’s 20MHz bandwidth in 5.8 GHz band to the LTE network’s 20MHz bandwidth on 2.6GHz band.
The company said this marks the first successful test in the industry of carrier aggregation (CA) technology that uses the WiFi network for faster LTE speeds. The CA technology refers to bundling more than two frequency bands to increase bandwidth.
The mobile carrier said the new technology will provide data transmission speeds equivalent to that of the fifth-generation network and make the LTE-U a focus of the network industry.
“We expect that users will be able to see a smart device supporting such technology by the second half of 2015,” said Park Chul-hwan, a LG Uplus spokesman.
