KDDI Selects Samsung to power its commercial 5G standalone network

Samsung Electronics today announced the company has been selected by KDDI to provide its cloud-native 5G Standalone (SA) Core for the operator’s commercial network across Japan. Samsung’s 5G SA Core will deliver a range of advantages for KDDI’s network, including lower latency and high reliability as well as 5G-enhanced capabilities. This ushered in a new generation of services and applications available to KDDI’s consumers and enterprise customers.

Samsung’s 5G Core solution supports both 4G and 5G networks, offering seamless migration from 4G to 5G. The company’s 5G Core is also designed with critical features to ensure the stability and reliability of the network such as an overload control feature to counteract sudden traffic spikes as well as geo-redundancy support. For geographic redundant deployment, Samsung and KDDI are operating multiple cores in various locations, with each core dimensioned to pick up loads in case one of the active cores becomes unavailable due to traffic bursts or natural disasters.

“We strive to provide the best mobile experiences to our customers through network innovation and our advanced 5G SA network will offer immense capabilities,” said Toshikazu Yokai, Managing Executive Officer, General Manager of the Mobile Network Technical Development Division at KDDI. “With Samsung’s 5G SA Core, we will offer unprecedented speed, instantaneous connectivity, and high reliability which could bring numerous new experience value for consumers and enterprises. We look forward to continuing advancing 5G networks to stay ahead of our customers’ needs.”

“KDDI has been at the forefront of opening up the next frontier of 5G services and we are proud to see our long-term collaboration deepen with new opportunities as we drive continuous innovation and realize technology vision together,” said Junehee Lee, Executive Vice President, Head of Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with KDDI to reshape the 5G services landscape in Japan and achieving new 5G milestones.”

The standalone architecture will enable KDDI to create an independent 5G network, enabling lower latency capabilities that are essential to high-performance use cases such as smart factories, automated vehicles, cloud-based online gaming, and multi-camera live streaming at sporting events.

Samsung’s 5G Core will also enable KDDI to optimize network slicing — a feature that requires a full 5G SA Core. Network slicing divides a single physical network infrastructure into multiple virtual slices, where each slice is dedicated to a specific use case or application. With this feature, a single network can dynamically support multiple 5G use cases and applications at once, accelerating the delivery of new services and meeting the tailored demands of enterprises and consumers. For instance, operators can create a low latency slice for automated vehicles, an IoT slice for smart factories, and a high bandwidth slice for live video streaming — all within the same network.

With the deployment of 5G SA Core, Samsung is providing a wide portfolio of its 5G solutions to KDDI — ranging from RAN to Core. In their collaboration, Samsung has been providing its 5G network solutions which support the operator’s low-, mid-, and mmWave spectrum bands — including Massive MIMO radios.

CT Bureau