SK Telecom and Ericsson Announce World’s First Demonstration of 5G Network Slicing Technology

SK Telecom (NYSE:SKM) announced today that it has successfully demonstrated 5G network slicing technology with Ericsson, a world-leading provider of telecommunications equipment and services.

Through the demonstration held at the company's Corporate R&D Center located in Bundang, Korea, the two companies have succeeded in creating different virtual network slices optimized for ▲super multi-view and Augmented Reality(AR)/Virtual Reality(VR) services; ▲massive IoT services; and ▲enterprise solutions. Moreover, they were also able to completely isolate and protect these virtual network slices from one another, thus successfully resolving one of the biggest challenges that can arise when multiple virtual networks share one physical network.

With 5G network slicing, a single physical network can be partitioned into multiple virtual mobile networks to offer optimal support for different types of 5G services. By providing virtual networks optimized for a variety of services on an as-a-service basis, SK Telecom will be able to secure a strong edge in the 5G era through enhanced network operational efficiency and reduced time-to-market for new 5G services. The technology is currently drawing much attention from standardization bodies such as 3GPP and ITU, global operators, major equipment vendors and software solution providers as a practical solution for supporting diverse 5G services in a reliable and efficient manner.

The successful demonstration of 5G network slicing technology marks the first milestone since SK Telecom and Ericsson announced in July a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) focused on the development of 5G core network with network slicing technology. As part of this collaboration effort, the two companies jointly working on building the world's first HDS-based Cloud datacenter for 5G early next year.

Hyper-scale Datacenter System (HDS): Hyper-scale & Cloud optimized infrastructure that guarantees high performance and high quality for IT and virtualized telco services.

They are also currently preparing to launch a joint 5G testbed at SK Telecom's Corporate R&D Center to set up the state-of-the-art end-to-end 5G system.

"Network slicing is one of the key enabling technologies for SK Telecom's All-IT based 5G architecture, and the successful demonstration of network slicing technology is a significant step forward to achieve the world's first commercialization/deployment of the 5G network system," said Alex Jinsung Choi, Chief Technology Officer at SK Telecom.

Ulf Ewaldsson, Ericsson CTO said, "The development of 5G is in a very exciting phase right now with important achievements in research and development. The success with the network slicing technology is critical to enable the network to be an innovation platform for new types of applications and thereby meet the future expectations."