SK says it's achieved the latest milestone less than two years after launching Korea's first LTE service in July 2011. The network offers speeds up to 150Mbit/s, twice the max of LTE and 10 times faster than 3G, says the operator.

In fact this version of LTE is produced by doubling the channel size, from 10 to 20 MHz: so faster speeds on twice the capacity. It plans to do the trick again by aggregating two 20MHz channels to drive 20 MHz channels to produce 300Mbit/s in 2015.

It even has a phone that the first users can actually use: Samsung’s ‘Galaxy S4 LTE-A, the world’s first phone optimized to work over LTE-A network.

SK says that to date, 13 operators, including Verizon, AT&T, NTT Docomo and Telenor, have announced plans to launch LTE-A, and among them Sprint, Telstra, 3 Italia and Yota said that they will do so within this year. However, no carrier, besides SK Telecom, has yet reached the goal by launching LTE-A network through LTE-A compatible phone, it boasts.