Last month, I was fortunate enough to represent Titan ICT in an Australian delegation of more than thirty technology and business leaders escorted to China to visit Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen and attend the Huawei Network Congress 2015 in Beijing.
Huawei is a global employer of more than 140,000 people with almost half involved in research and development activities. Shenzhen, a modern city located a short distance from Hong Kong, is a relatively new Chinese city established for design and development, and is home to several large Chinese firms. The Huawei Shenzhen campus spans many buildings and hosts many of its R&D personnel however its innovation centres are located throughout the world.
The Shenzhen Enterprise Solutions Centre is a showcase of Huawei’s technology innovation in wireless LAN technologies, LTE, Ethernet Switching, IP Routing, fixed access, video, cloud systems including compute and storage solutions as well as security technologies. Visiting the Shenzhen headquarters and the systems present gave us a taste for the Beijing Huawei Network Congress 2015 (‘HNC2015’).
HNC2015 was a two-day conference that had over 6,000 visitors in attendance for the key notes, exhibition hall and approximately 200 forums spanning seven technology and eight industry domains, and the opportunity to perform hands-on laboratory exercises with Huawei equipment.
Huawei’s key note echoed the theme of the Internet of Things which was also referred to as the industrial internet of which Huawei are predicting by 2025 there will be 100 billion connected devices – a phenomenal figure indeed!
Huawei’s Agile IoT Solution is how it plans to support the introduction of so many sensors and actuators. The solution consists of three main components:
Agile IoT Gateway supporting the connection of non-internet protocol enabled systems to the internet including local control and data processing within the Gateway itself;
Agile Controller leveraging Software Defined Networking (SDN) to provision the infrastructure required to connect and manage the IoT devices; and
LiteOS a very small footprint operating system purposely designed for low powered IOT endpoints such as wearable devices, building sensors and other components that have low processing capability and require extended battery life.
Huawei is working to lead the conversation in technology direction for various technologies including mobile broadband communications. While 5G standardisation has quite some way to go before it is ratified, Huawei is working to gain alignment with 3GPP members to simplify the model of the core network in order to make it more flexible and leverage cloud-based technologies. Simpler to build networks will be faster to implement and will enable operators to more rapidly introduce new products and services on mobile broadband technologies beyond traditional applications.
While Huawei in Australia is seen as an up and coming challenger, presentations from customers and partners from countries other than China made it very apparent that Huawei has breadth and depth in the information and communications technology sphere that is relevant to us all and its technologies deserve consideration.