Verizon, KT and Samsung have teamed up such that the CEO’s of the two telcos could have a secret video call with each other during the Superbowl.

The video call was yet another pre standard “5G” demonstration taking place between Minneapolis, MN and Seoul, Korea.  The trio have also stated, quite illogically, that such a grounded use case is an indication of how close the reality of 5G actually is.

“The fact that 5G is no longer a dream owes its debt to the collaborations we have carried out with operators like Verizon and vendors like Samsung,” said Hong-beom Jeon, Head of Infra laboratory at KT. “Our efforts have enabled some of the most demanding tasks to come to fruition.”

“Seeing Samsung’s 5G end-to-end solutions in action, including a working prototype 5G tablet, underscores how important our collaborative relationship has been in helping accelerate the availability of commercial 5G mobility for customers,” said Ed Chan, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Architect, Verizon.

“As we say at Verizon, ‘we don’t wait for the future, we build it.’ We are glad to be working with like-minded partners to build the 5G future globally.”

Looking at the nitty gritty side, Samsung supplied the network Infrastructure composed of 28GHz 5G access units, 5G home routers(CPEs), virtualized RAN, virtualized core network and prototype 5G devices. The trio claim the exercise successfully demonstrated how to bring one of the smallest 5G radio base stations and 5G home routers (CPEs) to market.

As well as allowing the two telco CEOs to whisper sweet nothings across thousands of miles with no threat of buffering or losing sync between video and audio, Samsung also took the opportunity to showcase a new 5G tablet. The Samsung tablet is capable of running on multi-gigabit per second speeds via 5G networks, as well as the latest 4G LTE network speeds.

Sanyogita Shamsunder, the Executive Director of 5G Ecosystems and Innovation at Verizon, said, “This latest demonstration at Super Bowl LII and in New York City is another example of how we’re pushing 5G to exploit never-before-imagined uses cases and applications.”

This is not the first time Verizon has used football to demonstrate the power of 5G. A few days earlier, two football players in virtual reality headsets were able to pass a football and complete plays without ever physically looking at each other. The 5G network their helmets were connected to was so fast that the milliseconds of latency didn’t affect their ability to interact in nearly real time.

There’s currently an arms race going on between the four major telecommunications companies in the United States, for which will be the first to roll out a commercial 5G network. What does this show of 5G power say about Big Red’s stakes in the race?

References:

http://telecoms.com/487589/verizon-kt-and-samsung-team-up-for-yet-another-5g-proclamation/

https://www.androidauthority.com/verizon-secretly-5g-test-super-bowl-lii-835383/