South Korea's SK Telecom has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Nokia on January 21, 2015, to work together to lead the development and verification of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network technologies. Under the MOU, the two companies will conduct joint researches to develop core 5G network technologies such as the gigabit-level data communications technology and cloud-based virtualized base station technology.

The two companies plan to make all-out efforts to demonstrate 5G in 2018 and commercialize 5G service in 2020. To this end, they plan to establish a test bed at SK Telecom’s Corporate R&D Center located in Bundang, Seoul, to verify and demonstrate 5G technologies.

In particular, SK Telecom and Nokia will develop ‘cmWave/ mmWave 5G technology*,’ which uses wideband spectrum resources in ultra-high frequency bands (above 6.5GHz ) for data communications. The technology is currently being discussed as one of the core 5G technologies by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a mobile telecommunications standardization organization.Combined with MIMO(multiple-input and multiple-output) technology, it supports gigabit-class data transmission

Meanwhile, in June 2014, SK Telecom has signed an MOU with Nokia to cooperate on the development of technologies including virtualization, software-based network establishment and next-generation cloud network management, all of which are critical in developing base stations for the 5G network. As the result, the two companies successfully developed ‘Cloud vRAN,’ a base station virtualization technology, in November 2014.