Huawei’s cloud promises hefty returns

At the 2017 Mobile World Congress Shanghai, (#WCS2017) China’s biggest foreign ICT brand export proves itself worthy to hoist the country’s flag as one of the most formidable telco carrier ICT technologist in this part of the world.

The twice a year event organized by GSMA entitled “The Human Element” saw Huawei’s exhibition area, prominently occupying the center of the main W2 Hall and also featured prominently at the W3 Hall where the GSMA Innovation City exhibits were being held.

Huawei went all out on Cloud this time, probably more heavily and seriously than it has ever done before, almost going hand-in-hand and parallel with the Internet of Things (IoT) trend whereby it managed a ‘Cloudification of Everything’ in its showcase of everything evolving to an “All Cloud” environment in the various areas of human interaction with technology.

Huawei’s showcase of the evolution to All Cloud covers four broad areas: (Carrier) Network, Services, Operations and General Networks.

An important product featured under Huawei’s Carrier Networks Cloud, as a building block for the architecture of cloud-based data centers, is the Huawei “CloudAir’ product that currently has strong appeal to many telcos around the world due to its ability to add value to the limited spectrum that telcos have. This includes easily adding on 5G to the same spectrum, enabling network slicing and the cloudification of power.

Under Huawei’s Services Cloud, a strong showcase of both test and commercial solutions were featured together with its IoT partners:-

This included the development of Smart Locks with Samsonite to remotely monitor the status of luggage, smart street lamps with Philips (already commercially available in the Czech Republic), Smart water metering that utilizes low powered, and narrowband 2G with long single battery life of 5 years, and many more. All of these make up what Huawei terms as “Glocal” (Global + local) description of its IoT ecosystem.

Another interesting feature by Huawei was its 5G Autonomous driving test currently being done with China Mobile, whereby safe automatic control of fleets of cars and vehicles will be possible with the imminent deployment of commercially ready 5G by 2020, 5G being the coveted carrier network generation that will enable the 9.6Gbps (speed) and at only 5ms (latency) that is required for secure autonomous driving for the automobile industry.

In the area of Smart City, Huawei presented its “Cloud City” showcase that covered a multitude of industrial scenarios and application / services, that demonstrates how Cloudification is effectively used for indoor building management, traffic and safety monitoring and medical and health services.

Huawei also features a strong working list of IoT partnerships, beyond conceptualization stage and already mostly at final trial stages – in the area of Smart Water, Smart Gas, Smart Electricity, Smart Parking, Smart Industry, Smart Street lighting, Smart Agriculture, Smart Healthcare, Smart Monitoring, Smart Building, Smart Bicycle, Smart POS.

Currently Huawei works closely with China Mobile, the world’s largest telcos (by subscribers) which has started the construction of a mobile Internet of Things (IoT) multi-cities project in over 340 cities across the country by 2017; and is concurrently committed to carry out 5G outfield test in 5 Chinese cities by this year.

Note: The Chinese government has attached great importance to 5G in the country’s 13th Five-year plan that covers the 2016-2020 period.

China is expected to become the world’s largest 5G market before 2025.