Deutsche Telekom(DT) and SK Telecom will be teaming up with several technology leaders and operators from USA, Asia and Europe that will include AT&T, Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies and Samsung, to align efforts on standardition of 5G & Internet of Things (IoT). Both operators announced strategic business partnership at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
AT&T in a separate statement said that it hopes to collaborate with a broad set of industry participants. The Operator said that it is in preliminary discussions with other operators that include China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DOCOMO, Telstra and Vodafone.
DT and SK Telecom will deploy the world’s first transcontinental 5G trial network. The network’s architecture in South Korea and Germany will be based on 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.
Teaming up with more technology leaders around the globe now will help identify and resolve key standards issues early and bring 5G to market sooner, said DT and SK in a statement. That will help the market-leaders of Korea and Germany to deliver new value to customers more quickly.
Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO Deutsche Telekom AG
From our point of view, the next release of the official 3GPP specifications are set to form the basis of 5G.
Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO and Head of Corporate R&D Center, SK Telecom
For 5G to be successful, early harmonization and standardization are essential. SK Telecom and DT started initial collaboration on 5G technologies and are now expanding the scope with a larger group of relevant stakeholders to promote early harmonization and expansion of the 5G ecosystem.
