Ericsson, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom in Industry's first transcontinental 5G trial

NEW DELHI: Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson has partnered with leading telecommunications operators SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom to deploy the world's first transcontinental 5G trial network. Ericsson will be the sole infrastructure supplier to the partnership.

The three companies will deploy a trial network in South Korea and Germany that uses key 5G technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), software-defined infrastructure (SDI), distributed cloud and network slicing. The principal aim is to enable global reach for advanced 5G use cases by optimizing user roaming experiences.

In addition, the partners will collaborate on 5G ecosystem development, global marketing promotions and potential standardization activities.

Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO & Head of Corporate R&D Center, SK Telecom, says: "5G is very different from its predecessors in that the system is built as a platform to provide tailored services optimized for individual customer's needs, at a global scale. Through this three-party collaboration, we will be able to better understand and build a 5G system that can provide consistent and enhanced user experience across the globe."

Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO, Deutsche Telekom, says: ""Many of the customer scenarios envisaged for the 5G era will require excellent quality of service globally. From our point of view, network slicing roaming will be a key enabler to support customers' international operations with an optimized experience. We are looking forward to participating in this alliance to further develop the use case."

Ericsson and SK Telecom conducted a successful demonstration of network slicing technology in October 2015. SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom signed a strategic partnership at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, held in February 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.

Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO, Ericsson, says: "5G will enable innovative use cases on a global scale. Ericsson is committed to ecosystems and cross-industry collaboration to help realize this potential and ensure the full benefits of 5G reach people, business and society everywhere as quickly as possible."

The partnership between Ericsson, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom was announced at MWC Shanghai, held June 29 to July 1, 2016 in Shanghai, China.