KT announced today that it has succeeded in verifying the 30km long-distance fronthaul in cooperation with Nokia, a global telecommunication equipment manufacturer.
The fronthaul refers to the section between the Radio Unit (RU) installed in the radio base station and the Distributed Unit (DU) installed in the local office.
The RU is a signal processing unit in the radio base station, and the DU is a digital data processing unit in the local office.
Because the existing fronthaul could support up to 20km apart, it was impossible to operate a wireless base station with RU installed beyond 20km.
For this reason, LTE and 5G coverage was provided through the regional office where the DU was installed to match the 20km distance of the fronthaul.
If there is a failure in the wireless network, it takes a long time to check the failure, so it is difficult to quickly recover from the failure.
To solve these difficulties, KT has been continuously conducting R&D to support long-distance fronthaul.
KT is the first in Korea to apply 30km long-distance fronthaul technology to commercial networks for both 5G and LTE.
This technology is expected to increase network operation efficiency by increasing the concentration of DUs that process digital signals of wireless networks.
