Turkcell and Samsung claim first live 5G trial in Turkey

Turkish mobile operator Turkcell claims to have carried out the country’s first live 5G trial in partnership with Samsung.

l-r: Turkcell CTO Gediz Sezgin; president of Samsung Electronics Turkey, Dae Hyun Kim; Istanbul Technical University president Mehmet Karac; Turkcell CEO Kaan Terzioglu; head of Samsung Networks Europe, Thomas Riedel

Turkcell ran an event to demonstrate UHD live streaming, cloud gaming, 360-degree camera and VR streaming all over 5G using Turkcell infrastructure and Samsung’s 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) solutions.

Turkcell CEO, Kaan Terzioglu said that the company’s aim is to make Turkey one of the first countries in the world to have 5G technology and is partnering with companies like Samsung and institutions like the Istanbul Technical University to make this possible.

“The live 5G experience that we experience today is the concrete example of the MoU we signed with Samsung in South Korea in February. Today, with 5G, we have shown that the latest generation of high-speed wireless access is now possible for our customers,” said Terzioglu.

“5G is a historic opportunity for Turkey. 5G does not only happen to be a communication technology, but is a total transformation, the digitalisation of sectors such as automotive, agriculture, health, and the transformation of industry 4.0.”

Samsung Electronics Turkey president, Dae Hyun Kim, said: “We are happy to contribute to Turkey’s efforts to embrace the state-of-the-art technologies through initiatives like this one which we successfully put into practice in partnership with Turkcell.

“Today, we took an important step together with Turkcell in providing the end-users in Turkey our leading 5G technologies, which will be further developed by means of our global investments.”

Samsung unveiled its first commercial 5G FWA solutions in February 2018, which designed to let end-users access Gigabit speed broadband services without optical fiber. In August, Samsung announced that it will invest US$22 billion in four emerging technologies – 5G, AI, automotive electronics components and biopharmaceuticals over the next three years.

Separately, a new study from Juniper research estimates that annual operator-billed revenues from 5G connections will climb from US$894 million in 2019, its anticipated first year of commercial service, to approach $300 billion by 2025.

The report forecasts that 5G service revenues will account for 38% of total operator billed revenues by 2025, despite the anticipated 1.5 billion 5G connections only accounting for 14% of all cellular connections in the same year.