BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SK Telecom
(NYSE: SKM) announced today that, together with Facebook, it will
join the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) as a founding operator to
drive innovations in telecommunications infrastructure and mobile
services.
TIP is an engineer-focused initiative driven by operators,
infrastructure providers, system integrators, and other technology
companies that aims to reimagine the traditional approach to
building and deploying telecom network infrastructure. TIP will
explore new approaches and technologies across three initial focus
areas: access, backhaul, and core and management. The project
groups within these areas will leverage the unique engineering and
operational expertise of each member, focusing on developing new
technologies and exploring new approaches to deployment in both
developed and emerging markets.
In the near term, TIP's work will focus primarily on
disaggregating the hardware and software layers in the traditional
network stack and recombining those elements in ways that enable
significant efficiency gains in urban and rural deployments. TIP
will also collaborate on the acceleration of technologies like 5G
and the development of new technologies that will pave the way for
better connectivity and richer services. In this work, TIP will
build on technology and knowledge contributions from its founding
members and operators.
TIP is joined by representative telecommunications companies of
countries across the world, like Deutsche Telekom (Germany), and global leading technology
companies and telecom infrastructure providers like Facebook,
Nokia, and Intel. TIP members will collaborate to accelerate the
development of new telecommunications infrastructure technologies
and bring the best innovative approaches to production network
deployment.
SK Telecom plans to contribute to TIP by sharing its
industry-leading 5G enabling technologies/services, outstanding
network solutions based on virtualization technologies like
Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions
Virtualization (NFV).
Meanwhile, in January 2016, SK
Telecom joined the Open Compute Project (OCP), an initiative for
open source hardware and data center design. The company plans to
present its progress at the OCP Summit to be held on March 9, 2016 in San Jose, U.S.
"Facebook is excited to work through TIP with some of the
industry's best engineering and operational talent to improve
connectivity worldwide. The challenge of meeting exponentially
growing network demand while increasing access and lowering costs
has never been greater. We will all need to work together to make
existing and next-generation building blocks more flexible and to
accelerate the development and adoption of more efficient
technologies. No one company has all the answers but we believe
that this open and collaborative approach will transform how
networks are built and operated worldwide," said Jason Taylor, Vice President of Infrastructure,
Facebook.
"The telecommunication industry needs a new pace of change.
Korea has the world's highest LTE penetration rate, rapidly moving
towards 5G. To meet constantly changing customer demands in the
upcoming 5G era and pursue the software-centric open architecture,
we need a new way to revolutionize how the networks are built. It
is our belief that TIP cooperation will open up a new possibility
in this aspect and SK Telecom is keen on contributing to this
project," said Park Jin-hyo, SVP and
Head of Network Technology R&D Center at SK Telecom.
About SK Telecom
SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM, KSE: 017670), established in 1984, is
Korea's largest telecommunications company with more than 26
million mobile subscribers, accounting for around 50% of the
market. The company reached KRW 17.137
trillion in revenue in 2015. As the world's first company to
commercialize CDMA, CDMA 2000 1x, CDMA EV-DO and HSDPA networks, SK
Telecom launched the nation's first LTE service in July 2011. SK Telecom also became the world's
first mobile carrier to commercialize 150Mbps LTE-Advanced in
June 2013 and 225Mbps LTE-Advanced in
June 2014 through Carrier
Aggregation(CA). In line with its efforts to swiftly move towards
the next-generation mobile network system, or 5G, it successfully
commercialized 300Mbps tri-band LTE-A CA. As of the end of
December 2015, the company has over
18.98 million LTE and LTE-Advanced subscribers. Based on its
strength in network operations business, SK Telecom is seeking new
growth engines through three innovative platforms namely Lifestyle
Enhancement Platform, Advanced Media Platform and IoT Service
Platform. For more information, please visit www.sktelecom.com or
email to skt_press@sk.com.
Media Contact
Cindy Kang
SK Telecom Co. Ltd.
(822) 6100-3836
(8210) 9113-2344
psyche@sk.com
Raphael Rashid
Edelman Korea
(822) 2022 8228
Raphael.Rashid@edelman.com
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SOURCE SK Telecom