South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) claims to have deployed the largest mmWave pre-standard 5G trial network using the 28GHz band at BMW’s driving centre in Incheon and says it has demonstrated the world’s first 5G-based connected car.

The ‘5G’ trial network covers all the tracks inside the driving centre, which spans an area of 240,000 square metres and supports peak data rates of more than 20Gb/s with sub-millisecond latency, SKT said.

SKT and Ericsson jointly developed and deployed the pre-standard 5G radio and core network infrastructure to cover the entire driving centre.

Using a combination of ‘5G’ and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies, SKT’s ‘T5’ connected car improves road safety and the driving experience by supporting ultra-low latency communication between vehicles and the surrounding environment, it said in a statement. For the demonstration, SKT worked with BMW Group Korea to install 5G terminals in two BMW vehicles.

SKT demonstrated T5’s capability to observe road conditions enabled by a video recognition camera installed in the vehicle to provide notifications and assisted-driving to drivers. In addition, the operator says it transmitted, in real time over the network, ultra-high-definition (UHD) video taken by 4K cameras and a 360-degree camera installed both inside and outside of the vehicle to the control centre.

Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO and head of SKT’s R&D Centre, said the connected car demo “marks the very first step towards achieving fully autonomous driving in the upcoming era of 5G”.

Despite SKT’s early claims, 5G isn’t expected to be officially ratified as a technology until 2018, with widespread commercial launches expected from 2020.