Digital worlds diverge at World Mobile Congress

Asia Times ^

[FarCenter]

BARCELONA – A record 85,000 attendees at the Mobile World Congress saw two radically different visions of the digital future.

Developed market telecom companies think of 5G mobile broadband as a consumer technology and worry that their market is close to saturation. China’s flagship digital infrastructure company, Huawei, thinks of 5G as an industrial technology and believes that the new digital economy is soon set to launch.

Two years ago, Western media wrote obituaries for Huawei after Trump administration sanctions denied the Shenzhen-based company access to US technology, including the fastest new chips with gate widths of 7 nanometers (nm) or less.

Huawei, whose handset sales briefly surpassed Apple’s, lost most of its smartphone business due to sanctions, but it has reemerged as the world’s top provider of telecom infrastructure, a source of cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) applications for mining, manufacturing and service industries, and a builder of digital technology for specific industries, especially automotive.

Huawei officials said they expected the company’s auto business alone to exceed the 2021 peak revenues of its handset business. They also anticipate substantial revenues from its green energy division, which uses AI-enabled solar cells to enhance energy conversion.

According to Huawei estimates, more than 10,000 Chinese businesses have built dedicated, or private, 5G networks, including more than 6,000 manufacturing firms.

That compares to a total of 171 private 5G networks outside of China, of which fewer than 20 are factories. “That’s because the Chinese government is pushing manufacturing companies to adopt 5G and AI,” a Huawei specialist said.

Ericsson and Nokia, Huawei’s European competitors, offered no examples of 5G-to-business applications in their exhibits. A press spokesperson for Ericsson said that the firm did not have data on the number of private 5G networks built for businesses.

The Chinese firm’s exhibit took up the whole of the Barcelona Fair’s first Exhibition hall, while its main competitors, including Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and IBM, were crammed into the second Exhibition Hall.

[Blueflag]

Major US carriers and telecoms rejected/ ejected Huawei gear and software WELL BEFORE Trump was elected.

There all found security gaps, to put it lightly, and a propensity of the gear to ‘phone home,’ and attempt to do so surreptitiously.

Trump’s actions plus the TAA act keep Huawei gear and software out of US 5G networks and cores.

I recall there is a rural wireless carrier in Montana that still uses some Huwaei gear for 3G and 4G, but they are reportedly the last US carrier to do so. They won’t be able to interconnect to other telecom’s 5G networks if Huawei is in their networks. It becomes self-limiting.

NET: Huawei is cheap and rumored to bribe really well overseas, so it is widely deployed outside the US, but *IS* absent from US civilian and government 5G infrastructure.