Settings

ⓕ font-size

  • -2
  • -1
  • 0
  • +1
  • +2

KT proposes joint 5G standard

  • Facebook share button
  • Twitter share button
  • Kakao share button
  • Mail share button
  • Link share button
KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu, left, listens to an introduction about Samsung Electronics' new Galaxy S6 smartphone alongside Samsung's mobile business division chief Shin Jong-kyun, right, during their visit to Samsung's exhibition booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday. / Yonhap
KT Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu, left, listens to an introduction about Samsung Electronics' new Galaxy S6 smartphone alongside Samsung's mobile business division chief Shin Jong-kyun, right, during their visit to Samsung's exhibition booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday. / Yonhap

By Kim Yoo-chul


BARCELONA — KT Chairman and CEO Hwang Chang-gyu has urged the telecom industry to join forces in establishing a fifth-generation (5G) standard for the next-generation mobile technology.

"We need to build a network that can support communication among billions and billions of nodes at real-time hyper speeds and low-latency," Hwang said in his keynote speech at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC), Tuesday (KST).

Hwang said everything was being connected on the Internet of Things (IoT).

He said setting up an industry standard for 5G would make it easier to develop new telecom-oriented business models.

"The network faces a tremendous load, posing a big challenge to mobile operators," he said. "The key focus is how to reduce data traffic within the new standard so as to ramp up capacity and connectivity."

He said 5G networks had the power to encourage innovation and would allow KT to diversify its business models other than the conventional subscriber-based one.

Companies are working on 5G to establish what they want it to be.

Hwang said KT's GiGA superfast Internet would play a critical role in leading such initiatives.

"We are constantly upgrading our fourth-generation (4G) network to provide 5G-equivalent services," he said. "With our powerful wired GiGA infrastructure,we have commercialized GiGA LTE and GiGA WiFi. And more GiGA services are on the way. And we're not stopping there.

"You will hear a lot this week about the IoT, big data, cloud computing and convergence services. These merge with the 5G vision."

The former Samsung Electronics president talked about a new version of "Hwang's Law."

When Samsung doubled memory density each year, it named this phenomenon "Hwang's Law," after Hwang.

Moore's Law was based on a 1965 observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who claimed that the computing power of chips doubled every 18 months.

Hwang took it a step further, saying that the memory capacity of chips could be doubled every 12 months. He has proven the law to be true for eight consecutive years.

"Let me tell you the story behind Hwang's Law 13 years ago," he said. "I predicted that memory chip density would double each year, not in 18 months. At that time, it was hard to believe. But we achieved the vision. We packed in more speed, and more capacity, in ever-smaller chips, letting us build smaller and more powerful devices. This made the mobile revolution possible."

He said this type of innovation could make a real difference.

"We did it with semiconductors and we are going to do it again with 5G," Hwang said. "The all-new 5G network will be the foundation of an incredible world of future innovation.

"IoT is real. It's here today and we need our networks to support the huge growth that is coming. This is only the beginning. The abundance of data will create new business models, and we, as operators leading our industry, must seize these new opportunities."



X
CLOSE

Top 10 Stories

go top LETTER