World’s first construction of environment for verification of 5G connected car to start test for commercialization - Utilize Nokia’s 3GPP standard baseband station for the test
December 3, 2018
SoftBank Corp.
SoftBank Corp. (“SoftBank”, headquarters: Minato City, Tokyo, President and CEO: Ken Miyauchi) has successfully organized the world’s first*1 environment for verification to develop the connected car with the use of 5th generation mobile communications network (“5G”) and started the verification for commercialization since November 2018.
SoftBank is pursuing research & development of various services and solutions capitalizing on 5G. The R&D includes a connected car that makes mobility, centered on a car, “connected” to all kinds of things, which will offer the new experience and value.
SoftBank has installed experiential 5G base stations at a proving ground of Honda R&D in Kamikawa-gun, Hokkaido, Japan, and built the state-of-the-art 5G network using telecommunication devices of Nokia (headquartered in Finland) pursuant to the 3GPP*2 standards. The outdoor 5G network environment, along with Non-Standalone (NSA) specifications*3 with the intention of future commercialization, is the first*1 in Japan.
This 5G network environment can transmit hi-resolution 4K images. We will test the transmission of the images to the in-vehicle experimental terminals.
This verification is performed as a part of the following research released on Nov. 16, 2017, titled as “SoftBank and Honda to Begin Joint Research on Connected Car Technologies that Utilize 5th Generation Mobile Communication System (5G) .” (https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/group/sbm/news/press/2017/20171116_01/)
*1: From an investigation by SoftBank
*2: An organization for developing the standards of mobile communication system
*3: A specification which allows carriers to realize 5G’s features and functions as soon as possible in cooperation with the existing LTE radio