Following the announcement of an Advanced LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone last month, Apple is also expected to unveil an LTE-A phone in the coming months. "SK Telecom is approaching Apple to put our LTE-A technology on the upcoming iPhone 5S. We are in the middle of negotiations," an SK Telecom executive was quoted as saying today by the Korea Times.

Samsung's updated Galaxy S4 LTE-A will also run on SK Telecom?s network, which is LTE-A is an upgraded version of LTE (long-term evolution) and is expected to offer Korean customers download speeds of 150Mbps, twice as fast as LTE.

The big winner is expected to be Qualcomm, which has already enabled the Samsung LTE-A smartphone with its Snapdragon 800 processor.