SingTel said it expects its LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) service, which it launched in August, to cover the entire city-state next month.

At launch SingTel, Singapore’s largest operator with a 51 per cent market share, said it was the first in the world to roll out a commercial LTE-A network supporting theoretical peak download speeds of up to 300Mb/s.

Rival M1 claimed in December to have nationwide LTE-A coverage, offering similar peak rates as SingTel. The unofficial threshold for the ‘nationwide coverage’ claim is 95 per cent coverage.

StarHub, meanwhile, has said it plans to have full LTE-A coverage by Q3.

In Asia multiple operators have launched LTE-A service in Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea.

South Korea’s SK Telecom announced in June that its new LTE-A service supports speeds of up to 225Mb/s using carrier aggregation. Rival LG Uplus also trialled tri-band LTE carrier aggregation using kit from Huawei, which it claimed can offer peak speeds of 300Mb/s.

In May Telstra demonstrated network speeds of 450Mb/s also using LTE-A carrier aggregation technology.