From servers to undersea cables to fitness bands: Huawei's portfolio is end-to-end

Huawei is a global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider headquartered in Shenzhen, China whose portfolio of end-to-end solutions can be found in telecommunications, enterprise networks, devices, cloud technology and services. The company's offerings are on show at various centres on its campuses, including at its Beijing Executive Centre and the Huawei Exhibition Hall in Shenzhen. Highlights of visits to both include:

Huawei's pipe strategy addresses the challenge of explosive data and traffic growth.

Mission critical acceleration solutions. The Oceanstor 18000 on the left, and a KunLun server representation on the right. The OceanStor 18500 V3 and 18800 V3 storage systems are Huawei's new benchmark for high-end storage, providing data services for enterprises. KunLun Mission Critical Servers combine an open design with breakthrough CPU interconnection and reliability, availability and scalability (RAS) 2.0 technologies.

Huawei's antennas can support high data bandwidths. A hexaband antenna supports multiple spectrum and can be upgraded over the air.

The CloudEngine 12800 Series of data centre switches (example on left) offers carrier-grade reliability, virtualisation support, iStack clustering, and software-defined networking capabilities for building and scaling data centres and campus networks. 

Huawei's NetEngine9000 series core router (NE9000, example in the centre) is a flagship core router created for large-scale data center interconnects (DCI), core nodes on the carrier backbone network, metro cores, and core nodes on large-scale enterprise networks.

In June 2017, Huawei officially released its mesh backbone network solution, featuring all-optical switching, full mesh, and one-hop service transmission. The new solution is designed to enable operators to deliver ultra-high bandwidth, meeting the demands of enterprises, Internet content providers (ICPs) and cloud service providers.The solution uses the industry's first commercial optical cross-connect (OXC) and optical transport network (OTN) cluster devices to reconstruct data centre-centric backbone networks and provide wavelength/sub-wavelength connections between data centres to ensure low latency and ultra-large bandwidth between any two data centres. The OXC concept is illustrated on the right.

This time division duplex (TDD) Massive MIMO demonstration in Beijing shows how a multitude of antennas in a transmitter/receiver can focus transmission and reception of the signal into small regions of space, as small as that of a single user. 

Describing 5G infrastructure in an urban setting - an exhibit in Beijing. With 5G an entire HD movie could be downloaded in 1 second. Self driving cars are another ideal application for 5G. While 4G allows response times of 3-5 milliseconds, this is too dangerous for driving. With 5G the latency can fall to under 1 millisecond, time enough for a car to stop within 2-3 cm of an obstacle.

The 5G virtual reality (VR) demonstration allows two players to play an interactive first-person shooter game in real-time, demonstrating the very high bandwidths and very low latencies required. 

Submarine cable technology in Beijing. A 100G C form-factor pluggable (CFP) module in the foreground, and a software-configurable 200G line board in the background.

There were many exhibits involving the Internet of Things (IoT). Connected devices can collect information which can be analysed to give users a better experience, while reducing setup and maintenance costs. This smart lamp post exhibition showcases an information centre around the humble lamp post. The smart lamp post contains radio units inside, and can also act as a charging port for cars allowing a carrier to earn more revenue and provide a safer environment for its base stations. Such a solution has been deployed in KSA.

Drone islands or stations are required for charging and supervision of connected drones, which can be used for crises and surveillance purposes.

The increased resolutions of 4K displays such as this one in Beijing will also require high-throughput networks to transport the display data quickly enough to avoid lag.

Third-generation shared connected bicycles from Mobike are powered by 20,000mAh NB-IoT batteries. The average consumption per ride is just 2.3 mAh. A fully charged battery can last 35 months.

A Haier air-conditioning unit in the smart home exhibit in Shenzhen highlights the benefits of white goods management with always-on NB-IoT connections. Unauthorised sales are eliminated as the storage location of the unit can be verified; configuration and maintenance can be carried out remotely, while fault reporting and other data can be captured for future product optimisation. 

Another smart home exhibit was a battery-operated connected smart smoke detector, which could be managed remotely. Data sent from the detector could yield ways to predict the likelihood of fire more accurately. As a connected device, a smart smoke detector can also sound the alarm immediately if it detects a fire.

Huawei produces more than smartphones under its consumer business group. There are wearables, tablets and laptops as well.

The Huawei TalkBand B2 is a fitness band. 

The Huawei MediaPad.

The Huawei Watch 2 has 4G LTE capabilities and can be used for standalone calls.

The Huawei MateBook X is a 13" laptop, shown here in pink. There was also a black version.

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Note: This report stems from a Huawei-hosted visit to China. The company sponsored accommodation and travel costs.