BARCELONA, Spain — After powering Korea Telecom’s (KT’s) 5G network at the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, Intel said it will team up with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo to roll out an even bigger 5G network — and help build the largest 5G commercial network in the world.
The KT network at this year’s Winter Olympics included more than 22 5G links at 10 sites delivering 3,800 terabytes of network capacity. It used Intel’s FlexRAN platform, which supports virtualized radio access networks (vRANs), and its multi-access edge computing (MEC) servers.
Looking ahead to 2020, Intel plans to help build “the world’s largest 5G commercial network,” said Aicha Evans, SVP and chief strategy officer at Intel.
At the Tokyo Games, Intel plans to power 360-degree, 8K-video streams with real-time action across high-resolution devices at Olympic venues, as well as smart city sensors and connected cars. Intel says it and other Olympic partners have already achieved data speeds of up to 1 Gb/s for 4K-resolution video communications with a vehicle traveling at 30 kph.
Athletes will also benefit from the 5G network, the chip giant said. This will include wearables and automated reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) simulations with access to data and analytics that will allow them to course-correct their training programs.
The PyeongChang Olympics provided more than a test lab for 5G technologies, said Sandra Rivera, SVP and general manager of Intel’s network platforms group. It was a “full-scale, network infrastructure, end-to-end, from the network to the cloud to the client device,” she said. In addition to multi-angle image capture, which allowed viewers to see multiple camera angles from 360 degrees, the deployment demonstrated multi-vendor interoperability and supported gigabit speeds.
5G NR Interoperability Demo
At this week’s Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Intel with Deutsche Telecom and Hauwei will demonstrate what they claim is the first public interoperable 5G new radio (NR) .
Last September, Deutsche Telecom and Huawei launched a 5G test network using pre-standardized 5G NR gear. And late last month, Intel said the three companies conducted the world’s first successful test showcasing 5G interoperability and development testing based on the Release 15 non-standalone (NSA) 5G NR specification.
