SK Telecom (NYSE:SKM) today announced that it, together with Samsung Electronics, successfully completed the first 5G call using the 3GPP 5G Non-standalone(NSA) new radio (NR) standard and commercial 5G NR equipment that can be readily applied to commercial 5G network. The call took place at the company’s 5G testbed located in its Bundang office building. 

The first 5G NSA-NR calls were achieved by utilizing end-to-end solutions that SK Telecom and Samsung jointly developed and built for the trial on 3.5GHz 5G NR radio, 4G LTE radio and NSA core.

In NSA-NR architecture, 5G is supported by the infrastructure of legacy 4G LTE where mobile devices are connected to both 4G and 5G for data traffic, while utilizing the 4G network for non-data traffic such as exchanging signals for mobility controls. 5G NSA-NR has been considered as one of the promising 5G architectures for the initial 5G deployments