SK Telecom, Nokia demonstrate Korea's first open RAN base station

SK Telecom Co. said on Tuesday that it verified jointly with Nokia the stable 5G speed and coverage performance in a field test by installing a cloud-based open RAN virtual base station on a commercial network.

Open RAN, which means an open radio access network, refers to separating hardware and software of mobile communications equipment such as base stations and standardizing interfaces between equipment so that equipment from different manufacturers can work seamlessly.

SK Telecom explained that it had continuously conducted studies on open RAN base stations together with Nokia last year, such as developing a cloud-based virtualized base station, and this time demonstrated 5G performance by installing it on a commercial network for the first time in Korea.

The company added that it has also succeeded in developing and verifying a radio access network intelligent controller (RIC) capable of automatically optimizing traffic, again jointly with Nokia.

The intelligent base station controller collects in real time the number of concurrent users and traffic volume for each base station and distributes the traffic of a heavy-loaded base station to neighboring ones.

Write to Han-Gyeol Seon at always@hankyung.com