Mobile carrier SK Telecom announced Thursday its plan to provide faster LTE services with wider bandwidth and LTE-Advanced services with increased coverage.

“We are now able to provide LTE services with wider bandwidth after securing a 35 MHz bandwidth in the 1.8 GHz band in the state-led frequency auction. LTE subscribers will be able to transfer data with speeds of up to 150 Mbps without having to pay any extra fees,” said Park In-sik, SK Telecom’s president of network business operations, during the press event.

The service will be launched in the Seoul Metropolitan area this year, and will be expanded nationwide by next July.

On top of this, SK Telecom plans to bolster its LTE-Advanced services. The mobile carrier has already set up its LTE-Advanced services in 84 cities since July through carrier aggregation, the bundling of two frequency bands.

SK Telecom plans to combine its bandwidths in the 1.8 GHz and 800 MHz spectrums to offer up to 225 Mbps of speed by next year. The company is slated to build a total of 32,000 LTE-Advanced base stations by the end of this year to cover more areas, including the nation’s 300 universities.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)