SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) today announced that it has received the 5G Asia Awards for two years in a row.

The 5G Asia Awards 2017, which recognize excellence in the APAC 5G & LTE industry, are part of the TechXLR8 Asia award, an anchor event of TechXLR8 Asia* held from October 2 to 4 in Singapore.

* TechXLR8 Asia is a festival of technology, bringing together Asia’s telco and tech ecosystem to discover the technologies that are enabling and shaping the connected future. The five co-located events taking place as part of TechXLR8 Asia include: 5G Asia, IoT World Asia, Network Virtualization(NV) & SDN, the AI Summit Singapore and Project Kairos Asia. The TechXLR8 Asia awards – which include 5G Asia Awards, IoT World Asia Awards and Lean in Asia Awards – highlights achievements in the APAC region’s tech and telco community, and offer an exceptional opportunity for the industry’s top players to meet, showcase their achievements, and be inspired.

The company has been chosen as the winner of the 5G Asia Awards 2017 in the categories of 1) ‘Best Core Network Product,’ 2) ‘Leading Contribution to NFV and SDN’ at this year’s TexhXLR8 awards held on October 3, 2017 in Singapore.

1) The ‘Best Core Network Product’ award recognizes the best 5G core network solutions, which will aid the development of the core to support 5G and services that will be deployed over it. SK Telecom became the winner of this category for its successful demonstration of Federated Network Slicing. Although 5G Network Slicing allows an operator to configure an end-to-end network that provides the desired functionality and parameters, it works only within an administrative domain. Federated Network Slicing extends this concept to a visited network. To assess its technical feasibility, SK Telecom teamed up with Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson to build the world’s first inter-continental testbed and successfully implemented it in February 2017.

2) The ‘Leading Contribution to NFV and SDN’ award recognizes the most innovative solution the field of network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN). SK Telecom was named the winner of this category for its successful development and deployment of T-MANO, a commercial carrier-grade NFV/SDN solution for integrated management and orchestration of various virtualized network functions, software and NFV infrastructure.

“SK Telecom is honored to receive these prestigious awards as they recognize our efforts to achieve innovations in the field of ICT, said Park Jin-hyo, Senior Vice President and Head of Network Technology R&D Center of SK Telecom. “We will continue to focus on developing breakthrough technologies to strengthen its position as the leading player in the global ICT industry.”