SK Telecom (SKT) has been tapped to lead a government-backed AI-RAN pilot aimed at testing out the technology for physical AI. It will build an AI-RAN pilot network using equipment from Samsung Electronics, HFR, Ericsson and Nokia.
South Korea's Ministry of Science & ICT and the National Information Society Agency will oversee the two-year project, which is a part of Korea's AI Highway initiative that aims to build ultra-low-latency, highly reliable networks for physical AI. The trial aims to verify and develop AI-RAN capabilities in industrial settings.
SKT said robots and other physical AI need connectivity that can support huge data volumes at low latencies while also being able to handle AI compute that robots could not manage on their own.
The pilot will run tests on three kinds of physical AI – a quadrupedal patrol robot for hazardous locations, autonomous transport vehicles for factory deployment, and energy-efficient humanoid robots. SKT says it hopes to commercialize AI-RAN-based services in manufacturing, logistics and safety.
SoftBank's AI-RAN orchestrator
The initiative is just the latest AI announcement from the Korean operator, which earlier this month revealed plans to invest in US AI data centers and build a 15GW AI data center in Korea. It has released its own AI agent for business and additionally holds a stake in Anthropic, now valued at just under $1 trillion.
But it isn't the only Asia operator working on AI-RAN. Japanese telcos SoftBank and NTT Docomo have already made early advances.
SoftBank has built an AI-RAN orchestrator, AITRAS, which optimizes AI computing resources. It has also signed an MoU with Samsung to work on 6G and AI-RAN. NTT Docomo has been testing out AI apps on what it calls its vRAN infrastructure, working with NEC, AWS and Qualcomm.
Both companies have partnered with Nokia to run AI and RAN workloads on its Nvidia-based AI-RAN platform.
SKT jointly issued a white paper with NTT Docomo on AI-RAN and vRAN in March – part of a long-term partnership on next-gen infrastructure.
Source: https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/sk-telecom-to-run-south-korean-ai-ran-pilot
