BONN/SEOUL -- 5G development and standardization have come full circle. Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom team up with several technology leaders and operators from USA, Asia and Europe to align for the coming worldwide communications standard and to enable a faster deployment.

“We are collaborating with a good mix of industry participants including AT&T, Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Samsung to make the vision of a common worldwide standard come true right in time. From our point of view, the next release of the official 3GPP specifications are set to form the basis of 5G,” says Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO, Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT).

“5G is making its way forward much faster than initially expected. For 5G to be successful, early harmonization and standardization are essential. SK Telecom and DT started initial collaboration on 5G technologies and are now expanding the scope with a larger group of relevant stakeholders to promote early harmonization and expansion of the 5G ecosystem. We strongly believe that this will serve as a foundation for future standardization activities,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO and Head of Corporate R&D Center, SK Telecom (Nasdaq: SKM).

Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that they entered into a strategic business partnership agreement to collaborate in the fields of services, Internet of Things (IoT) and related R&D areas like 5G. Teaming up with more technology leaders around the globe now will help identify and resolve key standards issues early and bring 5G to market sooner. When the industry completes a technology standard, the roll-out experience is smoother which helps businesses and consumers start using 5G technology even faster. That will help the market-leaders of Korea and Germany to deliver new value to customers more quickly.

DT and SK Telecom will deploy the world’s first transcontinental 5G trial network. The network’s architecture in South Korea and Germany will be based on key 5G technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), software-defined infrastructure (SDI), distributed cloud and network slicing. The principal aim is to enable global reach for advanced 5G use cases by optimizing user roaming experiences.

Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT)

SK Telecom (Nasdaq: SKM)