LG U+ and KDDI club together on 5G, 6G

South Korea's LG U+ and Japan's KDDI have signed an MoU surrounding 5G and 6G. The news was shared by South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.

According to the report, LG U+ and KDDI are keen on finding new 5G business applications and to cooperate on preparing for 6G. There was ambitious talk by the two companies, as reported by the news agency, of jointly developing 6G tech and influencing international standards.

The report further noted that the MoU represents a deepening of ties between the two companies. LG U+ and KDDI, it seems, have been jointly acquiring network equipment, extended reality (XR) tech and smart drones since 2015.

Solo progress

Last October, Ericsson announced that its cloud-native dual-mode 5G core was selected for KDDI's 5G standalone network. The Sweden-based vendor announced at the time that it paved the way to "ramp-up 5G use case development and realization."

KDDI previously revealed that Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung Electronics will be its primary 5G partners. The operator has also been working with Cisco Systems, which trumpeted its role in supporting the operator's "transition to 5G" with the Cisco Virtualized Packet Core and Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) architecture.

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In September, KDDI said it completed trials of network slicing in a 5G standalone network – one of the more promising business use cases for the next-gen tech – in collaboration with Samsung. LG U+ has been doing well from 5G, but more in the consumer space than serving business customers. It explains the 5G enterprise focus with KDDI..

David McQueen, executive director at Strategy Analytics, a research firm, gave special mention to LG U+ at Huawei's recent Better World Summit (BWS). By placing heavy emphasis on AR in 5G promotions, McQueen noted at BWS 2021 that LG U+ had managed to increase wireless service revenue by 12% compared with Q1 2019 (the quarter before South Korean operators launched 5G).

— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading