SK Telecom on Thursday said it has signed a new memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Nokia that expands the scope of the their collaborative work on 5G technology.
The South Korean operator said the companies will continue to work together on cloud-based base stations and gigabit transmission technology. They will also establish a test bed at SK Telecom’s Bundang R&D centre in order to jointly develop and demonstrate a 5G mobile connection running on millimetre wave spectrum in frequency bands of 6.5 GHz and above.
At a signing ceremony on Wednesday, SK Telecom and Nokia said they aim to show off the fruits of their labour by 2018 and to be ready to roll out commercial services in 2020.
"By joining hands with Nokia, we expect to accelerate our speeds toward the development of core 5G technologies," said Choi Jin-sung, head of SK Telecom’s corporate R&D centre, in a statement. "Envisioning an era where all things are organically connected, SK Telecom will continue to bring innovative changes to the mobile network structure."
This latest MoU builds on an earlier one between SK Telecom and Nokia that was signed in June last year. That saw the companies jointly develop virtualised base station technology, dubbed the Cloud vRAN.
SK Telecom has established similar partnerships with other telco vendors.
In July it signed an MoU with Ericsson that resulted in ‘elastic’ cell technology, which has the potential to increase cell-edge performance by up to 50%.
In October, SK Telecom signed another MoU, this time with Samsung, that covered 5G small cells, massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), and next-generation services such as augmented reality.
