SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) announced today that its LTE subscribers surpassed 6 million as of October 25, 2012.

SK Telecom continues to see a strong growth momentum in the number of LTE subscribers backed by its full nationwide LTE coverage, LTE-specialized services and technologies developed to enhance user experience and satisfaction such as T Freemium, T Baseball and Multi Carrier, and a rich lineup of premium LTE devices.

T Freemium is a service designed to enable customers to enjoy a wide range of multimedia contents free of charge. Subscribers on LTE 62 or above can simply sign up for the service to receive KRW 20,000 worth of points, which they can use to purchase diverse mobile contents including the latest and popular movies, dramas, games, applications and e-books. Within only six months since its launch on April 2 2012, the number of T Freemium subscribers exceeded 2 million and the number of content reached 15 million. The service – although still mostly actively used by customers in their 20s and 30s - is drawing in customers in their 40s and above, increasing their mobile content using experience.

The company also offers T Baseball, a free real-time professional baseball game broadcast service that comes with diverse useful features, to its LTE subscribers. The service alerts the user to playback a certain scene (or scenes) specifically preselected by him/her to not miss a single important game moment, and also offer highlights of the game. The number of customers who downloaded the T Baseball application surpassed 550,000 in just two months since its release in August 2012, thus rapidly creating a new trend in baseball game watching among LTE device users.
Furthermore, building on its nationwide LTE network coverage, SK Telecom is focusing on ensuring even better and faster LTE service by developing and applying innovative LTE technologies like Multi Carrier (MC). The company already completed applying MC to top 10 areas in Seoul with the highest data traffic; plans to install MC in all areas of Seoul and central areas of metropolitan cities by the end of this year; and aims to apply MC to traffic concentrated areas across the country next year.

Since releasing Korea’s first-ever LTE smartphone in September 2011, SK Telecom secured a rich lineup of LTE devices including 19 smartphones, 2 tablet PCs, and 2 USB modem. Also, SK Telecom has been embedding MC in its latest LTE devices including Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note Ⅱ, Optimus G, Optimus Vu Ⅱ, and Vega R3. The company plans to embed MC in all of the LTE smartphones to be launched.

"SK Telecom’s LTE specialized services - designed to induce more customers to experience diverse mobile contents without having to worry about heavy costs - such as T Freemium and T Baseball are rapidly becoming a must-use service among our customers," said Lee Inn-chan, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing Strategy Office of SK Telecom. "We expect that these services, strongly supported by the nation’s best network quality and richest device lineup, will help sustain the strong growth of our LTE subscribers, the number of which is expected to exceed 7 million by the year-end."