KDDI selects Samsung as 5G Core provider for networks across Japan

Last month, Samsung successfully demonstrated SLA network slicing on a live 5G network in Tokyo, Japan. And today, that demonstration appears to be paying off, as Samsung Electronic has just announced that it has been selected as the cloud-native 5G Standalone (SA) Core provider by network operator KDDI across Japan.

A major advantage of Samsung’s 5G Core solution is that it supports both 4G and 5G, which makes seamless migration from the 4G standard to 5G possible. The company’s 5G Core solution offers geo-redundancy support and ensures the stability and reliability of the network through overload control features that counteract sudden traffic spikes.

Samsung will power KDDI’s 5G SA network across Japan, and this new partnership is the result of the two companies working together for many years on a wide variety of projects. Recently, Samsung and KDDI commercially deployed Open virtualized RAN (vRAN) sites in Osaka, marking the world’s first commercial MU-MIMO implementation with O-RAN-compliant multivendor interoperability.

KDDI Managing Executive Officer Toshikazu Yokai stated that “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.”

In other recent 5G news, Samsung helped Verizon deploy 10,000 5G vRAN sites in the USA, with a goal of deploying 20,000 sites by 2025. Samsung also signed a multi-year patent licensing agreement with Nokia, which allows the Korean tech giant to use Nokia 5G technologies.