WCA September 2015

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68 Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2015
Telecomnews
Huawei in mid-June reaffirmed its European commitment by emphasising
its partnerships with operators, car manufacturers, and others, and
stressing Europe-based research and development. Editor Anne Morris
of FierceWireless:Europe identified the China-based equipment vendor’s
broader purpose: to help Europe establish a leadership position in future
technological developments in business and industry.
At its annual innovation day in Munich, Huawei announced a new alliance
with Britain’s Vodafone to develop cloud-based and Internet of Things (IoT)
services for enterprises. Ms Morris also reported Huawei as underscoring
existing alliances with other large operators including BT and Deutsche
Telekom; car manufacturers such as Audi; IT specialists including SAP;
research organisations such as Germany’s Frauenhofer Institute; and
projects supported by the European Commission, such as Horizon 2020.
“Europe is one of most important markets for Huawei outside China,” said
William Xu, the company’s chief strategy marketing officer. He added that
Europe “is at the frontier” of the vendor’s innovation work and collaboration
with partners. Huawei has already established 19 joint innovation centres
with its partners in the region, as well as 18 R&D centres of its own in eight
European countries.
Ms Morris wrote: “Both Huawei and Deutsche Telekom also said they believe
Europe is leading the way to what is being termed ‘Industry 4.0’ – a German
concept that essentially refers to the transformation of industry through new
technology and ‘digitisation.’” (“Huawei Vows To Put Europe In Vanguard
For New Digital Industrial Era,” 17th June). Dieter Wegener of the German
standards organisations VDE and DKE explains Industry 4.0 as an effort to
bring what is already happening in the consumer world to the industrial and
business world. Specifically, he told FierceWireless:Europe, to transform
products into services and to make use of wireless sensors, cloud-based
services, and the IoT to “digitise the value chain.”
Although in Ms Morris’s view Industry 4.0 “is still very much a vision,” she
reported the insistence of leading proponents of the concept that Europe
take the lead here. Even as US companies such as Amazon, Google and
Facebook are shaping the consumer world and driving its consumption of
digital services and content, Europe is seen as well positioned to lead the
charge as business and industry go through a similar revolution.
Ø Mr Xu summarised what he termed a 1-2-1 strategy for Industry 4.0, with
a notable contribution from Huawei. “The first ‘1’ refers to a single unified
IoT platform. The ‘2’ refers to two access modes – wired and wireless
– via industrial switches, industrial Wi-Fi, or eLTE. The last ‘1’ refers to
LiteOS, Huawei’s own IoT operating system.”
With an ambitious plan to bring consumer-world
digital services to industry and business, Huawei
renews its fealty to Europe
Two announced subsea
fibre optic projects will
establish links between
Europe and Latin America,
and Africa and Europe
Ø The European Commission has
said it plans to invest some $28
million in a submarine fibre optic
cable, tentatively named eulaLink,
which will link Lisbon, Portugal,
with Fortaleza, Brazil. As reported
by TeleGeography (12th June), the
EC disclosed that its participation is
by way of the Building Europe Link
to Latin America (BELLA) project
spearheaded by European research
network DANTE and its Latin
American counterpart RedCLARA.
The EC noted that Latin America
currently relies on undersea
cables to the USA to transmit
almost all (85 to 90 per cent) of
its communications with Europe.
The sole existing cable between
Latin America and Europe – the
5,280-mile Atlantis-2, which went
into operation in February 2000
– is outdated and used only for
voice transmissions.
The eulaLink cable, scheduled
for commissioning by 2017, will
be built by a consortium led by
Brazilian state-owned telecom
infrastructure provider Telebras
and the Spanish cable operator
IslaLink. The declared aim of the
initiative is to promote research,
innovation and education, as
well as business exchanges,
by reducing connectivity costs
and ensuring very high-capacity
bandwidth.
Ø On 10th June, Investir au
Cameroun reported that mobile
operator Orange Cameroon had
signed an agreement with the
government at Yaoundé for the
operation of the African Coast to
Europe (ACE) submarine cable,
slated for completion by the
end of this year. The business
journal quoted CEO Elisabeth
Medou Bandang as saying that
Cameroon’s third submarine
cable – after the SAT3 and WACS
cables – would enable Orange to
manage growth in data usage in
the country.
While details were not forth-
coming, it was previously reported
that Yaoundé in March issued a
call for expressions of interest
(EoI) in the construction of a
cable landing stage in Kribi and
a 404-mile fibre optic branch
to the ACE connecting point.
TeleGeography noted that the
10,560-mile ACE high-speed
cable, connecting the west coast
of Africa with France, is in the
second phase of its rollout to
additional destinations on Africa’s
Atlantic coast. The first phase,
ended in December 2012, saw the
network go live in 13 countries.
A Wi-Fi antenna adapted
from a standard
fluorescent light tube
could spell the end
for “dead spots”
Researchers at Malaysia’s Universiti
Teknologi MARA have used ionised
gas in a common fluorescent light
tube to create an antenna for a Wi-Fi
Internet router, the science news BigStockPhoto.com • Photographer: Krishnacreations