SK Telecom announced its ability to develop an end-to-end 5G system

Together with NOKIA, SK Telecom demonstrated live 20.5 Gbps transmission speed over the air being held in Barcelona, Spain. Standing at a point where 5G standardization and technology development are taking off, the successful demonstration of 20.5 Gbps is a meaningful achievement as it meets the performance requirement of 5G set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

In October 2015, SK Telecom and Nokia achieved 19.1Gbps transmission speed over the air using 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), 8×8 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission and 400 MHz of bandwidth.

The two companies explained that they were able to further improve the speed by improving the ‘Channel Coding’ technology – which adds extra data bits to make the transmission of data more robust to disturbances on the wireless transmission.

SK Telecom has already achieved 25 Gbps transmission speed over the air with Ericsson earlier this month in Stockholm, Sweden. But the company said that it is the first time to bring out the ‘real 5G’ speed out of the lab to the public