Dialing into Huawei's pre-MWC call to market
Chinese telecommunications company Huawei held its London-based Mobile World Congress pre-brief for those members of the press not lucky or brave enough to take on the Catalan capital’s annual device-fest.
Focused on Huawei’s technology rather than any of its more sensitive news regarding espionage threats, sentiment related to the USA or the arrest of its CFO in Canada, the company provided a tech-first presentation designed to inform media and analysis exactly where it might be going next on the global cloud & communications roadmap.
The expression “inclusive AI enables pervasive intelligence” sounds like it would be difficult to translate into Chinese, but it clearly does – otherwise it presumably wouldn’t have passed the corporate message set test back at HQ – and this was the banner message that the firm started with at this event.
Along with its favourite messages gravitating around AI (Huawei puts AI into its Kirin smartphone microprocessor and throughout its network technologies), the company stressed that this year 2019 will really be the year of 5G.
Ryan Ding, president of the carrier business group reminded us that the UK is a global leader in 5G deployment, so the company’s focus will gravitate to these shores naturally as a result, or so Ding suggests.
The company now comes to market with a range of self-developed 5G chipset technologies.
Ding spoke about the concerns that operators will have when upgrading to 5G networks and said that these firms might worry about the types of upgrades needed (such as the need to upgrade power units for example), he claims that 90% of operators the company has carried out research with won’t need to upgrade power.
Does Ding think that there is also an upgrade responsibility in terms of software architecture migration?
We can certainly say that yes there are [software] upgrades needed over and above the basic equipment upgrades.
5G business cometh
Huawei admin director Peng Song says that for Huawei’s research and development work is concerned, areas including mathematics, algorithms and chipset R&D all form part of its basic research function. The company has now taken that forward to establish 39 co-innovation centres with partners to develop specific business solutions – these are hardware- and software-centric developments.
These moves, which will logically also involve software application developers working to deliver applications that can take advantage of new 5G networks, is what will allow us to talk about 5G business.
Huawei marketing officer for the wireless network product line Peter Zhou says that what makes 2019 special is the fact that now both telecoms infrastructure (he’s talking about 5G again) and the smartphone (he’s obviously thinking about Huawei devices) itself have now come together to both share an advanced level of development.
Zhou also notes that Huawei has now moved to develop technologies that are capable of managing networks based on what it calls ‘scenario-oriented’ parameters – these are hardware and software technologies (typically located in base stations) designed to recognise traffic levels and data behavior patterns and so allow network management to be more thoroughly automated.
Looking at Mobile World Congress (MWC) itself, Huawei’s actual MWC booth presentation will also feature what the company is calling 3D parallel computing, which will offer what Huawei says is the highest computing density in the industry.
Is the UK really a leader in 5G as Ding initially suggested? Well, it’s ‘one’ of the leaders in a field most certainly led by South Korea as the undisputed forerunner… although Ding does say that operators in Britain are extremely open to innovation.
Plenty to dial into here… and Huawei continues to be an interesting (if not altogether predictable) firm of big interest to the tech market at large.
Huawei’s Ryan Ding