By Ron Chen, Bureau Chief, Asia

Samsung Electronics has announced the company has been selected by KDDI to provide its
cloud-native 5G Standalone (SA) Core for the operator’s commercial network across Japan.

Samsung’s 5G SA Core will deliver a range of advantages for KDDI’s network, including lower
latency and high reliability as well as 5G-enhanced capabilities. This ushers in a new generation
of services and applications available to KDDI’s consumers and enterprise customers.
Samsung’s 5G Core solution supports both 4G and 5G networks, offering seamless migration
from 4G to 5G. The company’s 5G Core is also designed with critical features to ensure the
stability and reliability of the network such as an overload control feature to counteract sudden
traffic spikes as well as geo-redundancy support. For geographic redundant deployment,
Samsung and KDDI are operating multiple cores in various locations, with each core
dimensioned to pick up loads in case one of the active cores becomes unavailable due to traffic
bursts or natural disasters.
‘We strive to provide the best mobile experiences to our customers through network
innovation and our advanced 5G SA network will offer immense capabilities,’ said Managing
Executive Officer, General Manager of Mobile Network Technical Development Division at
KDDI, Toshikazu Yokai,. ‘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. We look forward to continue advancing 5G networks to
stay ahead of our customers’ needs.’
‘KDDI has been at the forefront of opening up the next frontier of 5G services and we are proud
to see our long-term collaboration deepen with new opportunities as we drive continuous
innovation and realize technology vision together,’ said Executive Vice President, Head of
Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics, Junehee Lee,. ‘We look
forward to continuing our collaboration with KDDI to reshape the 5G services landscape in
Japan and achieving new 5G milestones.’
The standalone architecture will enable KDDI to create an independent 5G network, enabling
lower latency capabilities that are essential to high-performance use cases such as smart
factories, automated vehicles, cloud-based online gaming and multi-camera live streaming at
sporting events.
Samsung’s 5G Core will also enable KDDI to optimize network slicing – a feature that requires a
full 5G SA Core. Network slicing divides a single physical network infrastructure into multiple
virtual slices, where each slice is dedicated for a specific user case or application. With this
feature, a single network can dynamically support multiple 5G use cases and applications at
once, accelerating the delivery of new services and meeting the tailored demands of
enterprises and consumers. For instance, operators can create a low latency slice for
automated vehicles, an IoT slice for smart factories and a high bandwidth slice for live video
streaming – all within the same network.
With the deployment of 5G SA Core, Samsung is providing a wide portfolio of its 5G solutions to
KDDI – ranging from RAN to Core. In their collaboration, Samsung has been providing its 5G
network solutions which support the operator’s low-, mid- and mmWave spectrum bands –
including Massive MIMO radios.

For more than a decade, the two companies have been working together, hitting major 5G
networks milestones including KDDI’s selection of Samsung as a 5G network solutions provider
and 5G network rollout on 700MHz. Recently, KDDI and Samsung announced the industry’s first
demonstration of Service Level Agreements (SLA) assurance network slicing using a RAN
Intelligent Controller (RIC) on a live 5G SA network and the initiation of the commercial
deployment of Open virtualized RAN (vRAN) sites in Osaka, which is also the world’s first
commercial MU-MIMO implementation with O-RAN compliant multivendor interoperability.
Samsung has pioneered the successful delivery of 5G end-to-end solutions including chipsets,
radios and core. Through ongoing research and development, Samsung drives the industry to
advance 5G networks with its market-leading product portfolio from virtualized RAN and Core
to private network solutions and AI-powered automation tools. The company is currently
providing network solutions to mobile operators that deliver connectivity to hundreds of
millions of users around the world.
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