Apple breaks into Korea’s top-10 smartphone ranking
Homegrown players Samsung and LG unsurprisingly dominate South Korea’s smartphone market, but Apple managed to have two iPhone models in the top-ten ranking in Q2, according to Strategy Analytics.

The Samsung Galaxy S7, the Galaxy S7 edge and the LG G5 were the three most popular smartphones in the country in Q2. Looking at the top-10, Samsung had six models, while LG and Apple each had two.

The research firm referred to Korea as a highly concentrated market, with a handful of super-popular models, dominated by carrier distribution.

Vodafone India, BSNL sign 2G roaming deal
India’s second largest mobile operator Vodafone signed a 2G roaming agreement with state-run BSNL to share network assets across the country.

The deal will boost Vodafone’s 2G coverage in rural areas and strengthen BSNL’s network capacity in urban areas, the Economic Times said. Vodafone has about 137,000 sites nationwide, while BSNL has more than 114,000.

Asus mulls R&D centre in India
Taiwan’s Asus is considering setting up an R&D centre in India, but the discussion is in the early stages, the Taipei Times said.

The company, which plans to open its first flagship store in India later this year, shipped about three million handsets to India in 2015. Total shipments last year reached 20 million units.

Last month Asus rolled out its ZenFone 3 across much of Southeast Asia and India.

It has two overseas R&D centres, in China’s Suzhou and Hangzhou, which employ more than 1,000 hardware and software engineers.

Telstra hits gigabit downlink speeds in live demo
Australia’s largest operator Telstra and Swedish vendor Ericsson said they achieved peak download speeds of nearly 1Gb/s and upload speeds of close to 150Mb/s on an LTE Advanced network using carrier aggregation and 4×4 MIMO technologies.

The demo on Telstra’s live network used a Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE modem test device to deliver download speeds of 979Mb/s and uplink speeds of 129Mb/s, as measured by the User Datagam Protocol.

Ericsson said in a statement that 4×4 MIMO doubles peak rates with no additional spectrum. An additional boost in peak data rates was achieved using 256QAM on the downlink and 64QAM on the uplink. The gigabit downlink rate was powered by Ericsson Baseband 5216 hardware.