Largest U.S. carrier Verizon Wireless and South Korea’s largest telephone company KT have joined forces on Monday in order to put the future of the telecom service industry to the test. Specifically, the two companies have tested their 5G networking technology by demonstrating the world’s first live hologram international call over fifth-generation networks. According to the companies, the event marks the world’s first successful end-to-end 5G network interworking, and both tech giants reiterated they will continue working together in order to lead the global 5G push in the future.
The demonstration took place in Seoul, South Korea, as the CEO of KT, Hwang Chang-gyu met with Verizon CEO, Lowell McAdam in order to discuss their bilateral partnership in regards to advancing and developing new services, including live hologram video calling. The exact details are vague in regards to how the technology works over 5G networks, but during the demonstration, a KT employee held a hologram meeting with an employee of Verizon, who was rendered as a hologram on a monitor at the KT headquarters building. Hologram live calling is one of the 5G-based services KT has been working on, along with other services including 360-degree Live VR, Sync View, and Omni-View. Nevertheless, according to KT, network operators need to cooperate on a global scale in order to make these 5G services possible, as they require massive traffic volume, high data rates, as well as low latency on a global scale. This is not something that can be easily achieved without a solid global 5G infrastructure, and the demonstration held by KT and Verizon was the result of a partnership aiming to make 5G networking a possibility as quickly as possible. As KT’s Hwang Chang-gyu told the South Korean press, no company can commercialize 5G on its own, which is why collaborations like this one are important.
Additionally, KT and Verizon have also tested their orchestrators’ interconnection based on the software defined infrastructure for the first time, and both tech giants intend to jointly propose the orchestrators’ specification as an international standard. Furthermore, Verizon CEO also met with SK Telecom CEO, Park Jung-ho, and the two companies have confirmed they will continue to work together on 5G networking for connected cars. Finally, Verizon and SK Telecom have reportedly agreed on co-developing SKT’s vehicle-to-everything technologies – V2X.