SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have teamed up for the world's first transcontinental 5G trial.
The three companies will collaborate to deploy a trial network in South Korea and Germany that makes use of key 5G technologies including SDN/NFV, distributed cloud and network slicing.
With the trial the partners aim to optimize user roaming experiences to support global 5G use cases. The trio will also collaborate on 5G ecosystem development, potential standardization activities and global marketing promotions.
“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,” SK Telecom head of corporate R&D Alex Jinsung Choi said.
“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.”
Ericsson has separately entered a partnership with KDDI to deliver IoT connectivity to enterprise customers.
KDDI will deploy the cloud-based Ericsson Device Connection Platform to provide connectivity services to KDDI enterprise customers and support the global-scale deployment of IoT solutions.
Ericsson forecasts that by 2021 there will be 28 billion connected devices worldwide, of which 16 billion will be IoT devices.