South Korea’s top wireless carrier SK Telecom Co. will significantly upgrade its mobile navigation map ‘T Map,’ raising image accuracy by 10 times and adding advanced functions like automatic accident alert to following vehicles that use the same navigation map.

The firm decided to forge ahead with the plan to lead the forthcoming era of autonomous driving that will come for sure as machines are less prone to make mistakes than human drivers, said Park Jung-ho, chief executive of SK Telecom, at a press conference during the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday.

Park discussed the plan to upgrade image quality of T Map with Jen-Hsun Huang, president of the world’s leading graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. when they met during the CES trade show held in January in Las Vegas to pursue a business partnership.

T Map is Korea’s most commonly used mobile navigation service with over 10 million active users.

Park also said the company will incorporate chips from Qualcomm Technologies to enable vehicle-to-mobile device and vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity through T Map and power safety-supported technologies like collision avoidance.

Park picked media, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) as the firm’s future growth engines.

The mobile carrier plans to launch a fifth-generation (5G) pilot service in the second half of this year with a goal of full commercialization in 2020. The firm called for prompt 5G standardization at the MWC.

Park Jin-hyo, Senior Vice president, Head of Network Technology R&D Center, SK Telecom said, “As the demand for 5G commercialization is rapidly increasing, it is crucial to complete globally agreed 5G standardization in time. 3GPP NR is the global 5G standard and we are making continuous efforts to accelerate 3GPP NR standardization with partners.”

By Shin Hyun-kyu

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