The South Korean wireless telecommunications operator SK Telecom showed its LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) three-band carrier aggregation (CA) technology at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), in Barcelona, Spain last week, TeleGeography has reported, achieving download speeds of 450-Mbps by aggregating three component carriers of 20-MHz each. The technology, which could be commercialized as early as the end of 2014, can download an 800-MB movie in just 14 seconds.

In June 2013, SK Telecom opened the world’s first LTE-A network with carrier aggregation, providing downlink data speeds of up to 150-Mbps, or twice the 75-Mbps it was delivering over its LTE network without aggregation. Then, in November, it demonstrated further transmission speeds of 225-Mbps via 10-MHz+20-MHz CA.