SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have jointly built and demonstrated the first intercontinental 5G trial network, showing off a roaming particular application of the much-vaunted technology of slicing – which allows the network to be segmented into slices, on-demand, for individual services as defined by an enterprise or service provider. This demo applied the virtualized technique to international roaming, making the two operators’ network slices available in one another’s footprint so that roaming end users would have the exact same experience in South Korea and in Germany. It was based on Ericsson’s new 5G Core, which uses SDN/NFV techniques to enable slicing and other capabilities (see lead article). The demo is an interesting one, since roaming is always a…