South Korea’s number-one operator SK Telecom has pledged to enter the “era of LTE 2.0” over the next 12 months by upgrading to LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology, and launching both RCS services and a new VoLTE-based service it calls ‘HD Voice.’

At a press event this week, SK said it had already achieved 99 percent population coverage for its LTE network (first launched last July), and was now the world’s second-largest LTE operator after Verizon Wireless in the US.

The company expects to surpass 3.4 million LTE subscribers by the end of June and says it is on track to hit 7 million by year-end.

It also claims it will become the first in the world to “commercialise multi carrier (MC)” LTE, beginning next month, and will launch commercial 150Mb/s LTE-A services in the second half of 2013.

Meanwhile, SK unveiled plans to launch its VoLTE service named ‘HD Voice’ in the third quarter of this year. It said that, compared to existing 3G voice calls, HD Voice offers up to 2.2 times better sound quality and twice as fast call connection speeds.

It plans to combine HD Voice with the commercial launch of RCS services in the second half of this year.

It said it will “first integrate its messaging services such as SMS into an RCS service and provide differentiated service quality leveraging reliability and stability, the core strengths of mobile carriers, and plans to develop RCS into a next-generation integrated communication platform by expanding RCS-capable devices, securing fixed-mobile interworking, and converging RCS with HD Voice and other new services.”

Other plans in the pipeline include a series of online games optimised to work with the LTE network, and a mobile IPTV service called ‘Mobile B TV’ that will launch in July.