SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom demo intercontinental 5G trial network

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SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have built and demonstrated intercontinental 5G trial network.

Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO of SK Telecom; Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO Deutsche Telekom and Ulf Ewaldsson, chief strategy and technology officer at Ericsson were instrumental in the 5G testing breakthrough that will benefit other telecom operators as well.

The demo featured an industrial maintenance use case involving a repair worker communicating via AR with support colleagues in a visited network. The scenario uses local breakout and edge cloud to enable the best service experience in terms of latency and throughput for the AR repairman.

The availability of world’s first intercontinental 5G trial network – connecting Korea and Germany – features the creation and roaming extension of network slices optimized for Augmented Reality (AR) and maintenance services. SK Telecom and DT network slices are available in the other operator’s footprint.

Ericsson conducted the demonstration at Deutsche Telekom’s R&D center in Bonn, Germany and SK Telecom’s 5G Testbed at Yeongjong-do (BMW driving center), Korea.

SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson announced their partnership to develop the 5G technology for such a network – at MWC Shanghai 2016.

“5G will provide extreme user experience anywhere and anytime, even when the user roams across different operators globally,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO of SK Telecom. “Federated network slicing will enable seamless platform sharing amongst operators for guaranteed user experience.”

Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO of Deutsche Telekom, said: “Network slicing is envisaged as a key enabler to support multiple services in the 5G era. Today’s breakthrough shows we can extend that concept to ensure optimized service experiences with global reach for our customers.”

5G network issues

5G network slicing will allow the telecom operator to configure an end-to-end network that provides the desired overall functionality and service parameters. Federated network slicing for 5G roaming extends this concept to a visited network. This technology will assist operator to provide a network service globally and customer does not need individual agreements with different operators.

A pre-requisite for federated network slicing for 5G is an enhanced cooperation model where mobile operators open up their network to host partner services. The home and visited operators must have agreements in place that enable the recreation of a given network slice in the visited network.

These agreements should cover aspects such as: network slice availability at the access layer (cellular, fixed), availability in the core network and the connection to customer application servers. The hosting of edge cloud resources by the visited network enables the execution of special business functions that demand high throughput and low latency, close to the customer in the visited network.

5G at MWC 2017

SK Telecom, at its booth (3H10) in Hall 3 during MWC 2017, will showcase how federated network slices can be created, managed, and terminated in the form of NS-as-a-Service (Network Slice as a Service). The created slices then can be used in various applications, including V2X and connected cars.

Deutsche Telekom, at its booth (3M31) in Hall 3, has created its 5G hub, to demo advanced technologies – including 5G-enabled robotics, the AR enriched slot car track and robot telepresence application on federated network slicing – supported by mobile broadband with low latency.

Ericsson, at its booth (2N62) in Hall 2, demo its innovations in areas including 5G; platforms and services for IT and Cloud, Networks and TV & Media; connected solutions for industries; and the Internet of Things.