
SK Telecom announced on August 30 that it established an R&D system for ultra-high frequency broadband millimeter wave, a core technology for the 5G mobile telecommunications technology,
at its Bundang research center in the south of Seoul.
In April, SK Telecom signed a memorandum with Samsung Electronics to promote mutual cooperation in key 5G areas, including next-generation network and the Internet of Things. With the establishment of the millimeter wave R&D system, SK Telecom plans to speed up the development of core technologies in order to achieve the 5G commercialization by the year 2020, first in the world.
With a very short frequency of 1-10 millimeters, the millimeter wave (30-300 GHz) is a frequency bandwidth which is affected not only by buildings or people but weather on rainy days.
The core part of the 5G technology is to realize 1,000 times faster telecom speed compared with conventional speed, by leveraging the wide broadband of the frequency which remains untapped yet.