South Korea’s largest mobile operator SK Telecom (SKT) plans to launch LTE Advanced networks in 2013, potentially making it one of the first in the world to do so. The plans were mentioned in a statement released today from Samsung, SKT’s partner in the launch of its LTE services (which were switched on in Seoul last Friday). LTE Advanced is the next-generation version of LTE (which itself is only just starting to be commercially deployed) from the 3GPP camp, and takes the official technology name of LTE Release 10 & Beyond. The key characteristics of the ITU’s IMT-Advanced standard are believed to be downlink speeds of 100 Mb/s in the wide area with high mobility and 1 Gbit/s in low-mobility scenarios; low latency at less than 10 millisecond roundtrip delay; and very wide spectrum bandwidths of up to 100 MHz. Last week network vendor Ericsson said it expected to see commercial operation of LTE Advanced networks in 2013, which would be “more than ten times faster than today’s commercial LTE networks.”

Separately, Reuters reports today that SKT has launched a mobile advertising platform, ‘T ad,’ joining the likes of Google and Apple as the segment expands with the popularity of smartphones. SKT, which controls around half of the country’s mobile market, will draw on its application store and large smartphone subscriber base to provide mobile advertising solutions for smartphone applications and other media such as internet-based TVs. It plans to expand its service from its own application store to others such as Google’s Android market and Apple’s App Store. Similar to Google’s AdMob and Apple’s iAd, SK Telecom’s platform will give developers 60 percent of the revenue derived from applications. Reuters cites data from the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) that claims the domestic mobile advertising market is expected to jump 64 percent to US$450 million in 2012 from 2010. SKT’s smaller rivals KT and LG Uplus have also rolled out mobile advertising platforms.