Huawei Technologies, the world's largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, is slowly spreading its tentacles into other fields, using its telecoms technology to good effect, according to a senior company official.
Norman Frisch, marketing director for Huawei's enterprise business group and transport sector, told iTWire during a visit to Melbourne last week that the company now had used GSM-R technology — a wireless mobile trunking system which is widely deployed for mission-critical rail communication — to upgrade 46,000 kms of rail in several countries and equip it for more efficient operation.
The company is developing the LTE standard to move up from GSM-R, and Frisch heads the eLTE Industry Alliance; the lowercase "e" refers to a proprietary Huawei derivative of the LTE standard.
Frisch, who gave a presentation on "ICT for public transport" at the AIIA Intelligent Transport Forum while he was in Melbourne, provided details of projects in a number of countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe where Huawei has done work on intelligent rail transport.
{loadposition sam08}Among these are the Ankara Eskisehir HSL video surveillance project, a Metro Istanbul line, smart bus systems in Ecuador and Spain, and a light rail system in Ethiopia.
Norman Frisch: "...you cannot have a train that goes from Sydney to Perth in four hours."
There is a trial going on with Alstom in France of the world's first LTE multi-service system and the company is also preparing an eLTE case for Heathrow airport and Felixstowe port in the UK. Worldwide, Huawei has half of the intelligent transport market, Nokia 30%, KCC 12%, and ZTE the remaining 8%.
Regarding the North American market, Frisch said some markets were open, and others were not. "In North America, there is no GSM-R network. It is totally running on analogue systems. So a lot of development will have to happen there but it has not happened."
Asked about Australia, Frisch responded: "We have existing customers here. We have customers for GSM-R, (but) we are not in a position to provide the names."
Brent Hooley, who works for Huawei in Melbourne and was present during the conversation, said the firm was currently in talks with several state governments, all of whom were looking to move from GSM-R to LTE. "They're all talking to us and exploring what they can do," he said, adding that private bus and tram operators were also involved in a similar exercise.
At present, Nokia provides the GSM-R network for Victoria's rail transport. Frisch said he was not sure if there was any company which could compete with Huawei when it came to LTE.
Frisch said the situation in Australia was totally different from that in Europe where rail authorities were looking to get any journey between major cities that took under four hours travel time to run on an intelligent rail system. He cited the case of airports and said these were being targeted because rail operators wanted to grab the airport customers.
"That will not work here (Australia)," he said, "because you cannot have a train that goes from Sydney to Perth in four hours. But there are metro systems and a lot of things can be done with them."
On the telco side locally, Huawei operates 8000 base stations for the Vodafone network, half of Optus' network (Nokia does the other half). "We work closely with TPG and also worked with iiNet before TPG bought them," said Hooley.
Despite its size, Huawei has a relatively low profile. The one time that it did become a big part of the news in Australia was back in 2012 when the then Labor Government banned it from bidding for any NBN contracts, a ban that turned into a diplomatic spat. Huawei faced a similar setback in the US in 2013, when both it and ZTE were prohibited from supplying equipment to several government agencies.
Asked about these incidents, Frisch replied: "I am working on the technical side. With regards to political background, I am not in a position to describe to you and explain why (these incidents happened)."