SK Telecom envisions transforming itself into a platform company, making the mobile network as a platform where new services can be created and supported including traditional telco applications, media apps, streaming and IoT applications.
“We need to transition the current telco infrastructure into more of a datacenter infrastructure with wireless connectivity at the end so introduction of new services becomes more agile and faster with new services” said Kang-Won Lee, Senior Vice President of R&D, SK Telecom at the Open Networking Summit 2016. “Average LTE data usage per user per month is expected to increase by 5 times over the next 4 years which presents a significant challenge for a network operator like us.”
Lee predicted the next generation change to a 5G network would happen in 2020 and leading mobile operators need to prepare now. The consensus amongst most service providers and vendors is that this transition will see traffic growth by over 2 orders of magnitude, latency to be 10 times lower and the network will need to support many different devices. SK Telecom wants to bring new opportunity and provide new customer experience with it.
To accomplish this, he emphasized the need for reducing total cost of ownership leveraging open hardware and software; simplifying network design, management; enabling automation and moving fast through prototypes, trials and failures. He also shared SK Telecom’s collaboration across the ecosystem ranging from open source projects, vendors and other service providers; highlighting its contributions to ONOS, virtual network management solution for CORD (CORD-VTN), Mobile CORD (M-CORD) and hardware development.
Watch the full talk ‘Building a Next Generation Mobile Network Using Open Technologies’ below.
