The number of South Koreans who subscribed to the long-term evolution network increased more than 13 times last year as a growing number of people opted to connect their smartphones to the faster mobile network, data showed Thursday.

The country’s LTE subscriber base reached 15.9 million as of the end of 2012, expanding 13.4-fold from a year earlier, according to industry data. The figure translates to 40,000 new LTE subscriptions a day.

The number of Korean LTE subscribers is estimated to account for roughly 28 percent of the global LTE population. The GSMA projected worldwide LTE users to reach 57.2 million by the end of 2012, while data by the World Cellular Information Service showed that there were 54.5 million global LTE subscriptions in November.

By company, top mobile carrier SK Telecom Co. claimed the largest number of LTE subscribers at 7.6 million. No. 3 player LG Uplus Corp. followed with 4.4 million and KT Corp. trailed with 3.9 million.

Mobile carriers have been ramping up their marketing campaigns to lure more users to the lucrative LTE service. Last month, the country’s communications watchdog fined the three firms a combined 11.89 billion won ($11.18 million) in addition to business suspensions for providing discriminative subsidies. (Yonhap News)