The nation’s top three telecom carriers – SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus – plan to offer the world’s fastest tri-band LTE service from March when updated handsets are launched.

The breakthrough comes as they have succeeded in applying the 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation or QAM software technology that bundles more bits into the spectrum being used.

According to LG Uplus Tuesday, the application, the first of its kind in the world, will enhance data transmission speeds and network capacity by about 33 percent.

The company said it has enabled peak speeds of up to 400 megabits per second, which means the time taken to download a 1 gigabyte movie will be reduced from 27 to 21 seconds.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)