MTC: Huawei is here to stay

Augetto GraigMobile Telecommunications Limited (MTC) will maintain and strengthen its relationship with Chinese technology giant Huawei into the foreseeable future.“We hope to continue to cooperate with Huawei in technological innovation in the country to provide the most advanced, safe and quality services for domestic consumers,” says the state-owned service provider’s communications department.Huawei has been making headlines in international news lately after the United States convinced Canada to arrest one of the Chinese company’s top executives. On Tuesday, 22 January the New York Times reported that the US planned to formally request the extradition of chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou within a week. She was arrested on 1 December 2018 because the USA wants her to face charges that she had lied to American banks about Huawei’s efforts to evade Iran sanctions.They have 60 days from the arrest to request extradition before the matter goes before Canadian courts. China has responded by arresting Canadian citizens and escalating the sentence against one Canadian convicted of drug smuggling to death. Both countries say it has nothing to do with their crucial trade talks to recommence on 30 January.In recent years Huawei has placed itself at the forefront of internet-related communication technology, and it is heavily involved in the development of 5G technology.This is despite a ban on working with them in the United States, and several other countries warning against using Chinese hardware because of security concerns stemming from the Chinese government's use of Huawei's products to spy on people around the world.Huawei has denied all allegations that it might be involved in the collection of intelligence for the Chinese government, according to Al Jazeera.'Not warranted'But MTC says security concerns regarding 5G are not specific to Huawei, and neither are they warranted. “5G is much safer than previous generations of mobile network communication technology. It is a reflection of a continuous effort of all industry stakeholders to build a secure communication environment for mobile consumers with expertise learned from previous generations further reviewed and enhanced in the 5G security design,” they say.According to MTC, top operators in the world are still working with Huawei. “According to our market intelligence, Huawei is nevertheless seeing fast growth, securing 30 contracts to supply 5G equipment and shipping 25 000 5G base stations already, up from 25 contracts in December,” the mobile telecommunications company said.“As a leading ICT (Information communication technology) service provider in Namibia, MTC will cooperate with the reliable and leading technology suppliers to bring the latest and most advanced technology to Namibia, to benefit our people, our country,” said MTC.According to MTC the partnership with Huawei has already brought milestones. Namibia became the first country on the continent to adopt 40 Gbit per second Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), an innovative technology used to increase bandwidth over existing fibre networks in 2011, MTC said.Other achievements are establishing the first 4G network in Namibia in 2012, and testing Africa’s first 4.5G network in Namibia in 2016.In 2017 Huawei partnered MTC in its 081Every1 campaign to provide total network coverage for the entire Namibian population.Priority“Namibia’s first priority is to ensure there is mobile and broadband network coverage across the whole country, including rural areas, where the majority of Namibians will have affordable access to the network,” MTC communications department elaborated.“Our communities must have good access to the network that will aid our government to deliver quality of service and improve our people’s quality of life via various channels of communications,” the company said.“As a reliable partner of MTC and citizen enterprise in Namibia, Huawei brings in cost efficiency and high-quality solutions to help MTC speed up the delivery of 081Every1 project, and Huawei offered three years free SLA (service-level agreement ) service for the 081Every1 project,” MTC said.“We will continue to work with outstanding international vendors including Huawei to bring secure and innovative technologies including cloud and 5G to Namibia, to better serve our customers and to stay, ‘at the forefront of ensuring that in Namibia, we maintain pace with technological developments by staying ahead of the technology growth curve’,” MTC said, quoting President Hage Geingob.Recently Huawei introduced its revolutionary Kunpeng 920 chipset designed to better handle huge data. Ask specifically about this, MTC said it would benefit from the innovation and leading technology brought by Huawei, “which enables MTC and Namibia to keep leading the ICT industry in Africa.”Just yesterday the Chinese tech giant presented the new Tiangang 5G base station chipset, and announced plans to release a next-generation smartphone based on its own technology instead of US components.

MTC: Huawei is here to stay

Comments

Namibian Sun 2024-11-27

Please login to leave a comment

MTC: Huawei is here to stay

Comments

Namibian Sun 2024-11-27

Please login to leave a comment

Login