Choi to head O-RAN Alliance as he leads DT into extended reality
Appointments

Choi to head O-RAN Alliance as he leads DT into extended reality

Alex Jinsung Choi T-Labs.jpg

The O-RAN Alliance, a community of mobile operators, vendors and research institutions, has appointed Deutsche Telekom’s Alex Jinsung Choi as its new chairman.

Choi, now head of T-Labs at Deutsche Telekom, is also leading a German national effort to develop 6G technologies for extended reality (XR).

At the O-RAN Alliance, Choi was elected as new chairman of the board of directors after serving as COO. He replaces AT&T’s Andre Fuetsch, who served as chairman of the alliance from 2018 until his retirement from the company in August 2022.

The new COO, replacing Choi at the alliance, is Stefan Engel-Flechsig, who has been its in-house lawyer since 2018.

Back at Choi’s day job, Deutsche Telekom said it is taking the lead for 6G NeXt, a research project that is part of the “6G industry projects for research into integrated systems and sub-technologies for 6th generation mobile communications”.

6G NeXt is funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF).

The project involves nine partners from industry and science, including Deutsche Telekom.

It will be working on future applications and services that “will generate huge amounts of data that need to be transmitted with high speed and reliability”.

One of the core tasks of the project, said Deutsche Telekom, is to develop a high-speed software layer with native AI network optimization for real-time data processing.

Choi, who moved to Deutsche Telekom from South Korea’s SK Telecom in 2017, said: “6G NeXt is focused on developing a foundational infrastructure where we can test and validate advanced immersive XR experiences even in the most demanding use cases.”

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