Regional Telecom Leaders Focus on How Innovation has Changed Life

Huawei spearheads talks at Zain Technology Conference 2014 on future of the Smart Home, Efficient Office, and Future Network

Mobilk - During this week’s annual Zain Technology Conference 2014, senior executives and experts from Huawei—a leading global ICT solutions provider—have outlined how upcoming innovations in mobile broadband technology are likely to impact the Middle East in the coming year as the digital era brings people, ideas, and businesses closer together.

The three-day Zain Technology Conference 2014 brought together Zain’s global partners to outline their latest services in the telecommunications and IT field while at the same discussing opportunities of mutual interest between the Zain’s numerous partners and service providers.

The opportunities presented by Huawei at this year’s conference focused on the areas of the Smart Home, the Efficient Office, and the Future Network—three domains where the company anticipates life to be changed through technology innovations in the Middle East.  

“At this year’s conference Huawei teamed up with Zain to look at how life is changed with innovation. This means looking beyond specific technology solutions to the impact that our industry is having on everyday life, on businesses, and on national economies,” says Pan En, Vice President of Solution Sales & Marketing, Huawei Middle East. “An important part of this process is developing initiatives that build a better connected world. In that future, Huawei is committed to working with Zain to create more efficient, integrated information and communication systems that connect people, things and ideas more freely.”

 

“ZTC is growing bigger with every passing year, reflecting the development of the dynamic telecommunications industry, where today’s innovations are tomorrow’s differentiators. Together with with longstanding partners like Huawei, technology innovation and its implementation to enhance our customer’s mobile experience lies at the heart of what Zain is doing,” says Scott Gegenheimer, Zain Group CEO. 

 

One of the key features of this year’s conference was Huawei demos of its latest work on 4.5G & 5G mobile broadband technology, which is set to open up massive connection capacity for operators and pave the way for operators to deliver richer multimedia services with fewer delays. The advancements of 4.5G will also provide operators with the chance to adopt new innovations in service-oriented network architecture prior to 5G mobile broadband being commercialized in 2020. 

For several years Huawei has been working closely with leading operators to carry out trials and tests on future technologies including 4.5G and 5G broadband. A new series of Huawei 5G base stations were even previewed at this week’s conference. According to the company, the commercialization of 4.5G will start becoming a reality by 2016 as both an evolved and advanced mobile communication standard. To meet that ambition Huawei is making great investments in the future that will include a minimum of USD$600 million in 5G research & development by 2018.

To support Zain’s ICT strategy to explore new services in consumer and enterprise fields, Huawei also introduced its next-generation data center solution—Distributed Cloud Data Center (DC²)—a new data center reference architecture based on cloud and SDN networking. This architecture can unify and manage separated data centers, and provide customers self VDC service with application intelligent awareness and SLA guarantee by resource pool across data centers. All of these capabilities will help Zain shorten the service time to market and provide a variety of integrated services to their end user. 

Huawei and Zain have a long history of collaboration in the Middle East across a wide range of telecommunication services. Since 2010 Huawei has been a steadfast partner in the rollout of mobile broadband for Zain across all its operations including the recent launch of a Joint Innovation Center in Kuwait earlier this year.