SK Telecom has completed build-out of what it claims as the world's first commercial HSUPA network with speed of up to 5.76Mbps in Seoul.
Initially the network covers two districts of Gangdong-gu and Songpa-gu in Seoul, and will be extended to the entire city by the first half of 2008.
Full commercial service is scheduled in the second quarter of next year when handsets for HUSPA are released in the market, the mobile carrier said.
Earlier in June 2007, SK Telecom built a HSUPA network with speed of up to 1.45Mbps in Busan.
Kim Won-Ki, SK Telecom's manager of MNO strategy team, said the mobile carrier will extend the HUSPA coverage to 23 cities across the nation by the end of 2008 and 84 cities by 2009.
With a maximum of 5.76Mbps of data transfer speed, HSUPA boasts upgraded uplink data speed from the existing HSDPA network. Under the new 5.76Mbps-HSUPA network, it takes just 1.4 seconds to send a 1MB picture, 15 times faster than current available data transfer.
This, said Kim, will further accelerate the current trend of user-generated content and drive the company's W-CDMA/HSUPA business, which is positioned as a premium service.
By October SK Telecom had a subscriber base of 21.4 million, of which 1.63 million were W-CDMA users while the remaining 11.84 million were cdma2000 1x EV-DO customers.