Page 78 - SAMENA Trends - August-September 2025

TECHNOLOGY UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

SK Telecom's WiFi 7 to Board City Buses in South Korea

SK Telecom announced that it has con- (AP) to improve service quality during the initial installation of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. While
firmed improved communication quality second and third phases of the existing initial average download speeds were 429
by providing a pilot service to introduce bus public Wi-Fi rollout. SKT began the pi- Mbps with Wi-Fi 6/6E, speeds with Wi-Fi 7
5G/LTE-based Wi-Fi 7 to city buses for the lot in May, targeting 100 buses in Seoul and equipment ranged from 715 to 1,003 Mbps
first time in Korea. This pilot service was Gyeonggi Province, including trunk (blue), depending on the route. Average usage per
implemented as part of the Bus Public Wi- branch (green), and metropolitan (red) device also increased by 20–30%. In May,
Fi project led by the National Intelligence lines. The pilot will continue through the Wi-Fi 6/6E equipment recorded average
Service under the Ministry of Science and end of August. According to interim inspec- usage of 272,979 MB per device, while Wi-
ICT. The key feature is the deployment of tion results, download speeds improved by Fi 7 devices reached 365,211 MB on the
5G/LTE backhaul-based Wi-Fi 7 equipment an average of 1.5 times compared to the same bus routes. Wi-Fi 7 delivers faster
transmission speeds and lower latency
compared to its predecessors. It simultane-
ously supports 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz
frequency bands, reducing interference
and accommodating more devices. Its 320
MHz channel width doubles that of Wi-Fi
6/6E, increasing simultaneous data pro-
cessing capacity. Additionally, Quadrature
Amplitude Modulation (QAM) is improved.
While Wi-Fi 6/6E supports 1,024QAM, Wi-Fi
7 supports up to 4,096QAM, allowing dens-
er data transmission per signal. Stability
is enhanced through Multi-Link Operation
(MLO), enabling simultaneous uploads
and downloads across multiple frequency
bands.

AWS Earmarks $4.4B for New Zealand
Cloud Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) committed to spend more than
NZD7.5 billion ($4.4 billion) to introduce cloud services in New Zea-
land, establishing a new region in the country, with the data Centre
investment expected to create about 1,000 new jobs annually. With
the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, AWS noted in a statement
customer can run workloads and securely store data in the country,
while serving end-users with even lower latency. Prasad Kalyanara-
man, VP of infrastructure services at AWS, added the new region
will help serve the growing demand for cloud services across the
country and “empower organizations of all sizes to accelerate their
digital transformation”. The region, with three availability zones,
will run on 100 per cent renewable energy from the start, sourcing
power from Mercury New Zealand’s Turitea South wind farm. The
launch adds to AWS’ global infrastructure of 120 availability zones
across 38 geographic regions. AWS has plans for an additional
ten availability zones and three new AWS regions in Saudi Arabia,
Chile, and Europe.
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