South Korea’s SK Telecom has crossed 5 million LTE subscriber mark in just one year since releasing its first LTE smartphone in September 2011. The company exceeded 5 million LTE subscribers in 46 days after breaking the 4 million mark in July 30, 2012. 

South Korea’s SK Telecom has crossed 5 million LTE subscriber mark in just one year since releasing its first LTE smartphone in September 2011. The company exceeded 5 million LTE subscribers in 46 days after breaking the 4 million mark in July 30, 2012. 

Operator signed up a daily average of 33,000 LTE users in August, maintaining strong subscriber growth. In April, the company made an upward adjustment to its year-end LTE subscriber target from the initial 5 million to 7 million as its swift deployment of nationwide LTE network and a rich lineup of premium LTE devices boosted the adoption and usage of LTE service.

Company also announced that since the launch of LTE service, its LTE customers have used a total of 33.5 petabytes (or 1024 terabytes) of data. Of the total, 46% was used for multimedia contents, which is 10 percentage points higher than that of 3G customers (36%). In August, LTE customers’ daily average data usage for YouTube was 3.2 times greater than that of 3G users.

SK Telecom expects its number of LTE subscribers to reach 14 million by the end of 2013 and 18 million by the end of 2014.