Samsung Electronics will officially launch the ‘Galaxy Note 4 S-LTE’ on January 21. It supports the 3-band Carrier Aggregation (CA) for the first time in the world. It is only 7 months after the company released the ‘Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A’ for 3 times faster broadband LTE-A service last June. With the release of new product, the marketing competition among mobile carriers is forecast to intensify.

The Galaxy Note 4 S-LTE, which was already unveiled at the end of last year, has almost the same specifications as theGalaxy Note 4, but differs in speed. The Galaxy Note 4 supports broadband LTE-A (maximum speed 225Mbps), whereas the Galaxy Note 4 S-LTE comes with the 3-band modem chip and thus its maximum speed is 300Mbps.

SEC has been developing technology since early last year with the aim of commercializing the 3-band CA technology. The company demonstrated the ‘3-band LTE-A’ network, capable of producing 450Mbps (Category 9), at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) last February for the first time in the world.

SEC continued the ‘world’s first’ fame for the 3-band CA following the LTE-A smartphone ‘Galaxy S4 LTE-A’ and the broadband LTE-A smartphone ‘Galaxy S5 broadband LTE-A.’ Public attention is drawn to whether the Galaxy Note 4 S-LTE will make a breakthrough to overcome the crisis of reduced global smartphone sales along with the mid-to low-priced phones (Galaxy A series) scheduled to be released in the future.

The Galaxy Note 4 S-LTE will be supplied to customers on January 21 through SK Telecom and KT. It is priced at KRW957,000. SK Telecom provides an official subsidy of KRW100,000 to subscribers. LG Uplus and LG Electronics are planning to release the 3-band CA terminal G Flex 2 this month. Marketing competition among mobile carriers will be ignited.

KT is confident that, as it built the 3-band CA commercial networks in 85 cities around the country, it has sufficient technology. It decided to engage in aggressive marketing activities, e.g. providing an advance discount of KRE360,000 for customers using the low minimum plan and an affiliated credit card.

SK Telecom claims that it has already commercialized the 3-band CA terminal at the end of last year. It is not showing any special movement with regard to the release of the Samsung phone. The industry forecasts that a key competitive factor will be how many terminals the mobile carriers will secure since the initial quantities are small.

In the mid-to long-term perspective, it is predicted that securing contents specialized for the 3-band CA will be most important. As this technology can transmit large contents fast, the UHD real-time contents service, which has been impossible with existing technologies, will become possible.

“The 3-band CA terminals will be mostly used by maniacs at first in that they will be using the state-of-the-art smartphones that others don’t have,” said a mobile carrier insider. “For it to become popular, mobile carriers must offer new services clearly different than existing LTE.” 

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