South Korea’s KT is preparing to deploy commercial 5G NR Standalone (SA), along with a common core that can support SA, 5G NR Non-Standalone (NSA) and 4G. It is working with Samsung, and will first deploy the new core in KT’s mobile edge data centers across eight major cities. Samsung said that KT’s adoption of its control/user plane separation (CUPS) during the early phases of rolling out 5G NSA had made migration to SA easier as CUPs allows 5G SA services to be introduced via software upgrades, without having to create a separate 5G SA core. “With this advantage, we are able to rapidly and easily deploy 5G SA and NSA common core in our MEC centers without additional core…