South Korea’s largest mobile network operator by subscribers, SK Telecom, has selected Swedish vendor Ericsson to provide Long Term Evolution (LTE) services in the country’s ‘major cities’. In announcing the deal, Ericsson noted that its local operating unit – LG-Ericsson – will carry out the work on extending SKT’s 4G infrastructure, and the project is expected to be completed within the first half of 2012. Under the terms of the contract between the two companies, SKT will see its LTE footprint expanded to cities such as Busan and Daegu.
Commenting on the deal, Martin Wiktorin, president and CEO of LG-Ericsson, noted: ‘LG-Ericsson will provide the LTE network including LTE RAN and Evolved Packet Core as well as support services including engineering, design [and] deployment … The LTE radio access network will make use of Ericsson’s Operation Support System for Radio & Core (OSS-RC) and RBS 6000 base stations.’