Networking

This is a sensitive topic. Owners of entertainment content go to great lengths to control the distribution of their wares, especially when it comes to international markets for movies and TV, and even local regions for black-out sporting events. By contrast, VPN vendors go to great lengths making the case that you can use their services to bypass all those restrictions.  But there are times when, legally, you might want to use a VPN to watch a movie or video. If you’re traveling, you can VPN back to your home country and use your home streaming service account to watch your favorite show. That said, it is, at best, a legally gray area. VPNs and set-top boxes and streaming sticks don’t all work together well. The exception to this is the Amazon Fire TVs and Fire TV Sticks, and any Android TV box. The XGIMI Halo projector I recently spotlighted in an outdoor theatre project is one such device. But, if you’re using a Roku, an Apple TV box, or any smart TV not running Android TV, you’re forced to jump through a bunch of hoops, connecting your router up as a VPN, or connecting your TV as a client to your Mac or PC and using that machine’s VPN-protected network. Honestly, if you want to watch streaming TV through a VPN, just get a Fire TV stick and be done with it. It’s the easiest and least expensive path.

ExpressVPN

Best VPN for streaming

Native Streaming Apps: Fire TV, Android TV, Nvidia Shield TVSimultaneous Connections: 5 or unlimited with the router appKill Switch: YesPlatforms: A whole lot (see the full list here)Logging: No browsing logs, some connection logsCountries: 94Locations: 160Trial/MBG: 30 daysExpressVPN has been burning up the headlines with not the best news. We’ve chosen to leave ExpressVPN in this recommendation, and I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss ExpressVPN out of hand because of these reports, but it’s up to you to gauge your risk level. The best way to do that is to read our in-depth analysis:Also: Trust, but verify: An in-depth analysis of ExpressVPN’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN providers out there, offering a wide range of platforms and protocols. What we like about ExpressVPN is how it documents setting up VPN services for virtually all the most popular set-top boxes, even those that don’t natively support VPN. For each device, ExpressVPN has a guide walking you through the process.Also:With 160 server locations in 94 countries, ExpressVPN has a considerable VPN network across the internet. In CNET’s review of the service, staff writer Rae Hodge reported that ExpressVPN lost less than 2% of performance with the VPN enabled and using the OpenVPN protocol vs. a direct connection.While the company does not log browsing history or traffic destinations, it does log dates connected to the VPN service, the amount transferred, and the VPN server location. We do want to give ExpressVPN kudos for making this information very clear and easily accessible. Exclusive offer: Get 3 extra months free.

Surfshark

Native support for Fire TV and Android TV

Native Streaming Apps: Fire TV, Android TV, Nvidia Shield TVSimultaneous Connections: UnlimitedKill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Fire TV, Firefox, ChromeLogging: None, except billing dataTrial/MBG: 30 dayAt two bucks a month for a two-year plan (billed in one chunk), Surfshark offers a good price for a solid offering. In CNET’s testing, no leaks were found (and given that much bigger names leaked connection information, that’s a big win). The company seems to have a very strong security focus, offering AES-256-GCM, RSA-2048, and Perfect Forward Secrecy encryption. To prevent WebRTC leaks, Surfshark offers a special purpose browser plugin designed specifically to combat those leaks.Also:Surfshark also offers a multihop option that allows you to route connections through two VPN servers across the Surfshark private network. We also like that the company offers some inexpensive add-on features, including ad-blocking, anti-tracking, access to a non-logging search engine, and a tool that tracks your email address against data breach lists.

IPVanish

If you love Kodi, this is your VPN

Native Streaming Apps: Fire TVSimultaneous Connections: UnlimitedKill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Chrome, plus routers, Fire Stick, and KodiLogging: None, except billing dataServers: 1,500 Locations: 75Trial/MBG: 30 dayFor those folks who love the Kodi media player (and I’m one of them), IPVanish is the VPN for you. IPVanish has full, detailed setup guides for using Kodi with many of the more popular streaming set-top devices. Of course, you don’t have to use Kodi, but if you haven’t spent any time looking into this awesome open source home theatre system, you should.IPVanish is a deep and highly configurable product that presents itself as a click-and-go solution. I think the company is selling itself short of doing this. A quick visit to its website shows a relatively generic VPN service, but that’s not the whole truth.Also: My in-depth review of IPVanishIts UI provides a wide range of server selection options, including some great performance graphics. It also has a wide variety of protocols, so you can know what to expect no matter what you’re connecting to. The company also provides an excellent server list with good current status information. There’s also a raft of configuration options for the app itself.In terms of performance, the connection speed was crazy fast. Overall, the transfer performance was good. However, from a security perspective, it wasn’t able to hide that I was connecting via a VPN — although the data transferred was secure. Overall, a solid product with a good user experience that’s fine for home connections as long as you’re not trying to hide the fact that you’re on a VPN.The company also has a partnership with SugarSync and provides 250GB of encrypted cloud storage with each plan.

NordVPN

Best VPN for unlocking Netflix

Native Streaming Apps: Fire TV, Android TVSimultaneous Connections: 6Kill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, Chrome, FirefoxLogging: None, except billing dataCountries: 59Servers: 5517Trial/MBG: 30 dayAlso: How does NordVPN work? Plus, how to set it up and use itPerformance testing was adequate, although ping speeds were slow enough that I wouldn’t want to play a twitch video game over the VPN. To be fair, most VPNs have pretty terrible ping speeds, so this isn’t a weakness unique to Nord. It’s more than fast enough in most countries to stream your favorite movie or video. Also: My in-depth review of NordVPNIn our review, we liked that it offered capabilities beyond basic VPN, including support of P2P sharing, a service it calls Double VPN that does a second layer of encryption, Onion over VPN, which allows for TOR capabilities over its VPN, and even a dedicated IP if you’re trying to run a VPN that also doubles as a server. It supports all the usual platforms and a bunch of home network platforms as well. Also: My interview with NordVPN management on how they run their serviceThe company also offers NordVPN Teams, which provides centralized management and billing for a mobile workforce. Overall, a solid choice, and with a 30-day money-back guarantee, worth a try.

How does the router thing work?

You first install your VPN onto your router. This depends on the VPN provider and the router, so you’ll need to do some digging. But if your VPN and router are willing to play nicely with each other, then because all traffic on your network travels across your router, it will also be able to use the router’s VPN connection. It’s a bit crude but not as crude as the next on our list…

Wait, so I’m supposed to use my PC as as router?

Yeah, if you don’t have a compatible set-top box or a compatible router, the idea is you connect your TV to your PC or Mac as a network client, use that computer’s VPN client, and then go out over the network. It’s janky as heck, but the VPN vendors generally have clear enough guidelines. But, by the time you’re doing all that, just buy a $39 Fire TV Stick and be done with it.

So some set-top devices have native apps?

Basically, Android TV is a version of Android. That means that most apps in the Google Play store will run reasonably well on Android TV — including VPN clients. Most VPN vendors slightly recoded their Android handheld apps to have a wide-screen UI for the TV and pushed those apps into the Play Store. Since Amazon’s Fire TV is basically a skinned version of Android TV using Amazon’s app store, VPN vendors didn’t have to do too much technically to make it work — and Amazon is, of course, a huge market. So you just go to the app store and install the app. Easy peasy.

But not Apple TV or Roku?

Nope. You’re doing the router or PC network client hoop jump game. And before you ask, if you want to use Xbox, Playstation, or Switch to stream your entertainment, you’re also going to need to run your streaming movies through a router or a PC network sub-LAN.

But, if Android TV works, surely Chromecast does?

Nope. No it doesn’t. Same as the Roku or the consoles. Because Android giveth and Chromecast taketh away.

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

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10’000 Hours / Getty
I’ve been working on the internet since the early ’80s and its predecessors, such as ARPANET, before that. So when the web, or WEB as we put it then, came along, I started keeping a close eye on web browsers. Web browsers are still the primary way we connect with the endless fields of data, stories, and video that make up the modern web. Today, Apple Safari on smartphones — thanks to the iPhone — and Google Chrome on desktop are ways we work and play on the web.

Historically, it’s been challenging to get hard data on which browsers really were the most popular web browsers. True, many companies claimed to have good numbers, such as NetMarketShare and StatCounter, but their numbers are massaged. The US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), however, gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. That doesn’t tell us much about global web browser use, but it’s the best information we have about American web browser users today.And the top web browser is, according to the DAP’s 5.65-billion visits over the past 90 days (drumroll, please): Google Chrome with 48%. That’s a smidgen down from last year when Chrome had 48.3%.  This drop didn’t come from any sudden rise of Edge or another alternative browser. Perish the thought. On the desktop, Chrome rules. Also: Dumping Google Chrome? Here’s the best browser to replace itBut, in the last 12 months, we’ve seen an enormous rise of smartphones over PCs for web use. In 2022, 54% of the web browsing market belonged to smartphones over PCs. Back in 2019 and 2020, smartphones gained on desktops from 46.9% to 50%. Today, smartphones rule. Pay attention website designers: if you’re not developing sites for smartphones, you’re making a major blunder. Tablets? The tablet market is down to a mere 1.8%.As for smartphones, Safari rules. Macs are a bit more popular, having moved up to 10.4% of the PC market from 2021. But with a 35% market share, iPhones dominate both the smartphone and smartphone browser markets. Indeed, the iPhone’s iOS is now the most popular end-user operating system of all. All the varieties of Windows put together only comes to 31.1%. Android? It has only a 20.7% share The only other browsers that matter on smartphones, besides Safari and Chrome, are Samsung’s built-in Samsung Internet with a tiny 1.1% share and the generic Android Webview. Also: Here comes the web browser 100 problemAs for desktop web browsers, Chrome is even bigger than it looks at a glance. Its open-source foundation, Chromium, is also what Microsoft Edge runs. Edge, with 6.7% of the user base, is now the third-place web browser. Except for Mozilla Firefox, all the other web browsers that matter, such as Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, run on top of Chromium.Firefox is in fourth place and doing badly. In the last 12 months, Firefox dropped to 2.6% from last year’s 2.7%. In 2015, when I first started using DAP’s numbers, Firefox had an 11% market share. By 2016, Firefox had declined to 8.2%. It had a slight bounce upward by 2018 to 9%. Despite its ad deals with Google, Mozilla has been laying off more employees. Firefox, frankly, is becoming irrelevant.Finally, at long, long last, the long dying Internet Explorer (IE) has finally dropped off the list entirely. It’s gone from 2.2% in 2021 to be in the also-run category with everyone else at 1.9%.In short, today’s internet belongs to Chrome on the desktop and Safari on smartphones. Nothing else really matters.

Networking More

A newly announced AU$187 million five-year deal between Telstra and the Queensland government will see connectivity upgrades rolled out to 1,258 state schools over the next 18 months. “This investment will mean internet speeds across every single one of our 1,258 state schools will be 200 times faster as well as faster speeds for their communities,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said. “This will ensure teachers and students have access to the latest digital technologies and tools for their classrooms: everything they need for a world-class education.” Under the agreement, the average internet bandwidth speeds per student will increase from 25Kbps to 5Mbps by 2026. The pair added that around 40 schools will also be connected to fibre optic for the first time, while next generation satellites will be used to deliver faster internet where terrestrial options are less practical. “We know that digital inclusion for school kids is one of the most important drivers when it comes to positive education outcomes,” Telstra enterprise chief customer office John Ieraci said. “As a result of these upgrades, students from even the most remote parts of Queensland will have access to quality, high speed connectivity, and will get to enjoy all the opportunities that come with it.” This latest announcement follows similar contracts Telstra has signed with other states to upgrade bandwidth to schools, including New South Wales and Western Australia Elsewhere, Optus, together with Iota, ETS Electrical Services, and GreenBe, will work with the Toowoomba Regional Council over the next four years to deploy 68,000 new smart water metres to help improve water conservation, The deployment, according to Optus, will leverage its NB-IoT network, Iota’s devices and advanced metering infrastructure platform, and GreenBe’s user experience platform, while ETS Deployment Services will be responsible for bringing it all together. The metres are expected to deliver real-time water usage data, provide early leak detection warnings for residents in the Toowoomba region, as well as enable residents to identify which activities are causing high water consumption. “Essentially, this means that council will be able to operate the water network more efficiently and residents will be able to monitor their own water usage effectively which will provide cost savings to both the resident and to Council,” Toowoomba Regional Council Water and Waste Committee Chair Councillor Rebecca Vonhoff said. Roll out of the metres is scheduled to be completed before mid-year, following testing and fine-tuning by local community members in the second quarter of 2022.  Related Coverage More

Celona co-founders, from left, Ravi Mulam, Mehmet Yavuz, Rajeev Shah, Vinay Anneboina. “People inside any of the deep ecosystems like telecom or enterprise or cloud who truly appreciate how big a transformation is happening, were probably the ones most interested in being part of this journey,” said Shah, who is CEO. 
Celona 2022
The movement to use cellular frequencies as office broadband connections that behaves like wireless LANs is winning converts and money at a surprising clip.  Celona.io, the two-year-old enterprise 5G networking vendor profiled by ZDNet in November, on Monday announced it had received $60 million in venture funding in a Series C round, bringing its total funding to date to $100 million.   The new money comes with what appears to be momentum among some very large customers in the automotive and retail markets.  “We are getting some pretty specific validation points,” Celona’s CEO and co-founder, Rajeev Shah, told ZDNet regarding what he sees as his company’s leadership in the still-young enterprise 5G market, speaking in an interview by phone.  Those validation points include two of the largest retailers and a couple of the largest automotive companies in the world becoming customers, said Shah. He was not at liberty to disclose their names.  “We had set a goal to say, the most innovative enterprise customers, when they make their design choice for their private networks, we want to be that choice,” he said. The projects of those companies, said Shah, are “significant automation initiatives.” “In all of these scenarios, what’s really happening is they’re putting in big robotics and unmanned vehicle types of applications.” That includes using 5G for things in the back office, in particular, said Shah, because there are fewer dependencies to hold up the rollout. “But we’re starting to see it even in retails and venues, where the experiences for the actual consumer is being shaped by some of this.”  Also: Enterprise 5G is a software ‘revolution,’ says startup Celona One customer that runs venues is looking to 5G to cover an entire sports stadium “to affect how you check-in, how you do your ticketing, how you pay for things, the security covering the entire facility using cameras.” The technology is not being used as a replacement for Wi-Fi, said Shah. Rather, like the early days of Wi-Fi joining wired ethernet, for Celona’s customers, “it is almost like a shift left for them,” he said. A shift left is a term offered by Celona board member Matt Howard of Norwest Venture Partners, where a new technology is additive to what stays in place. “This is like 3.0,” explained Shah. “Think of the 1990s as driving LAN and desktop computing together, and Wi-Fi plus mobile was the next major trend; we see 5G LAN as AI-driven automation as the next wave.”Every time you have one of these things emerge from the right, everything shifts to the left.”

Another “validation point,” said Shah, is having the round of funding led by DigitalBridge Ventures, the venture capital unit of DigitalBridge Group, a Boca Raton, Florida-based real estate investment trust that has focused on tech-related property investments such as cell towers and data centers. “DigitalBridge is quite an innovative financial firm,” said Shah. “They went from being a traditional REIT and investment fund to becoming a digital infrastructure firm.” The fund sees everything from fiber to towers to co-lo as the infrastructure of 5G and edge and cloud, the “macro trends,” said Shah. “One of their observations, internally, was that while they had a lot of exposure to those growth vectors, they did not really benefit from what was going to be a correlated increase in software and hardware.” Investing in Celona, in other words, gives DigitalBridge a hand in that area of the payoff of 5G. Joining DigitalBridge are returning investors; Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, NTTVC, Qualcomm Ventures and Cervin Ventures. The mid-to late-stage growth market for startups was “very hot” in the fall, said Shah, leading to “very competitive terms” for the valuation and letting the company hit the high end of its valuation range in an oversubscribed round. He declined to disclose the post-money valuation. “People inside any of the deep ecosystems like telecom or enterprise or cloud who truly appreciate how big a transformation is happening were probably the ones most interested in being part of this journey,” said Shah. “The more run-of-the-mill SaaS investor is not the one we got the same resonance with,” he added. “There’s still a divide where the SaaS investor hasn’t fully caught on to how big a wave is coming.”   A somewhat surprising aspect of the announcement is Verizon as a customer. The company’s founders had experienced the intransigence of large carriers in the deployment of enterprise cellular in previous forms, a malaise they told ZDNet they would be careful to avoid.  But collaborating with big carriers is also important for going to market with large enterprise customers. And 5G is different enough from prior cellular efforts it can change the carriers, indicated Shah. “The traditional experience with operators all of us have had is that they’re very slow-moving,” said Shah. “But what has changed is the emergence of this new spectrum of CBRS,” he said, referring to Citizens Broadband Radio System, a part of the so-called S-Band of the spectrum below 6Ghtz that the FCC licenses for broad commercial use. CBRS is “neutral to any operator,” he said, meaning a shared resource among carriers rather than a fiefdom licensed to a single entity. The spectrum, therefore, “I think creates a dynamic where innovative customers and service providers are going to be rewarded for thinking more holistically.”  “I’m excited that someone like Verizon has really embraced that way of thinking,” said Shah. “I think their enterprise team is viewing this as an opportunity to really differentiate themselves,” he added. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that triggers a chain-reaction” among fellow carriers.  Priories this year with the new funding are two-fold: to expand the company’s march to the markets in the U.S. and globally and to continue product development investment.  “This is still a technology area that is ripe for innovation, so we are not going to slow down,” said Shah. “We are going to continue to make wireless even more automated in its operations.”  No follow-on financing is planned at this point. “We have no shortage of interest in people wanting a piece of the pie,” said Shah of investment interest. “But we have no need to do anything for the next two to three years.” The talent market is certainly competitive, which will be a challenge for expanding the team. Celona was 85 people when ZDNet last interviewed them. He said that the company has “reached the three-digit mark” just recently. The plan is to “effectively double as soon as we can hire,” said Shah. “Hiring another hundred people within the next few weeks and months is honestly one of our great initiatives.” “I think it’s a good place to join, so I’m looking forward to the new team that gets expanded.” More

This week, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, is holding its Atmosphere user event. After being virtual-only for the past two years, the conference has an in-person component due to the pandemic. For Aruba customers, Atmosphere has always been an important event because it’s the place to learn about the innovation the vendor is bringing to the network, particularly in Wi-Fi, where Aruba has been a technology leader since its days as an independent company. One could argue that the 2022 Atmosphere is the most important one since HPE acquired Aruba in 2015, given that the companies are planning to return employees to the office. In addition, COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation initiatives, which mandates upgrades to networks. Almost all the technology building blocks of digital transformation – including cloud, mobility, IoT and security – are network-centric in nature. Businesses cannot become digital organizations with a legacy network.Aruba announces new functionality in ESP and Aruba Central Today at Atmosphere, Aruba announced new capabilities in its Edge Service Platform (ESP), along with new functionality in its Aruba Central management portal, to enable a higher level of network agility. Digital businesses need to change with speed, and that requires an agile IT foundation, but legacy networks tend to be rigid and brittle. The new Aruba Central NetConductor enables businesses to centralize the management of distributed networks. Legacy networks are typically managed on a node-by-node basis, which is why it often can take months to make even a simple networkwide change. Aruba goes cloud-native for new capabilities Central NetConductor is a service built on a cloud-native platform that brings the benefits of the cloud to the network. Nearly all facets of IT infrastructure have benefited by centralizing capabilities in the cloud. Computing and storage have been trending this way for more than a decade. Unified communications and contact centers are currently in this transition. The network, however, is not there yet. The centralization of configuration capabilities enables network administrators to make a change once and propagate it across the network in near real-time. This can be key for policies that dictate application performance but also for the enforcement of Zero Trust and SASE security policies. In its media advisory, Aruba highlighted three key principles of network modernization. They are: Automation. Just a few years ago, automation was a dirty word with network professionals because many viewed it as a threat to their jobs. Today, the opinion has changed because automation is the only way for IT to manage a hybrid workforce. Central NetConductor offers simplified, intent-based workflows with AI-enabled automation to remove much of the heavy lifting with which network engineers are tasked. Security. The rise of the cloud and personal devices have made security in the app or endpoint difficult to manage. In a world where everything is connected, infusing security into the network makes the most sense. NetConductor offers increased threat detection and protection with integrated identity-based access control and dynamic segmentation, which are important components of zero trust. Security has always been a key differentiator for Aruba. In fact, I have often referred to Aruba as a security vendor that delivers its value through the network. Agility. As mentioned earlier, network agility is critical to business agility. NetConductor uses standards-based protocols such as EVPN, VXLAN and BGP and operates as a virtual overlay to a physical underlay. This enables NetConductor to work with other vendors. Customers also have purchasing flexibility because they can procure the solution in a network as a service (NaaS) consumption model. Improved indoor location services coming to Aruba Wi-Fi Aruba also announced self-locating indoor access points (APs) with built-in GPS and Open Locate, an emerging standard, for improved indoor location services. AP installation is a manual process, which can lead to inaccurate location information. Aruba’s Wi-Fi 6 and 6E APs use a combination of traditional Wi-Fi location and GPS to improve indoor location services’ accuracy greatly. The new APs obviate the need for surveys or record location information as the entire process is automated. Historically, Wi-Fi triangulation was very inaccurate, but the new Aruba capabilities improve location services down to under a meter. This is critical for asset tracking, safety/compliance purposes, facility planning, retail apps, venue experiences or other location-based services. Many businesses I have interviewed have been interested in building indoor location-based apps, but the lack of accuracy has held them back. HPE has handled the Aruba acquisition very well, primarily by letting the group run autonomously. Since the purchase, HPE has expanded the portfolio of Aruba products from being primarily Wi-Fi to the campus and WAN. These new solutions can help businesses modernize the end-to-end network and prepare for the next era of work.

Networking More

Does your business need Real, with a capital R, internet? If that’s your company, you should check out the Comcast Business Gateway. This next-generation Advanced Gateway, when paired with Comcast’s Xfinity Gigabit Pro speeds of up to 3/3 Gigabits per second (Gbps) symmetrical broadband, can deliver Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) speeds of up to 2 Gbps.

This new Gateway boasts three Wi-Fi bands of 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz. Together, this reduces interference and increases overall bandwidth enormously to support up to 150 devices. “Connectivity is the backbone of business, and as the speed of business accelerates, our customers demand a high-performance technology that can be their workhorse – and their racehorse,” said Christian Nascimento, Comcast Business’s vice president, of Product Management & Strategy.Of course, to make the most from this new high-speed Wi-Fi, you need PCs, smartphones, and devices that support Wi-Fi 6. A network is only as fast as its slowest link. So, if your laptops are still running 802.11n gear, even if the last-mile connection to your office is 3Gbps, your laptops will still get, at most, 300 Megabits per second (Mbps) speeds. Besides sheer speed to numerous users, Comcast also claims that the combination of its fiber network and its Wi-Fi speeds can deliver ultra-low latency for response-sensitive applications such as videoconferencing. It also offers static Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This will better enable companies to offer access to on-premise websites and internet services to clients and work-from-home employees. The gateway also comes with multiple voice-over IP (VoIP) ports, a built-in Ethernet switch with two multi-gig ports, an eight-hour battery backup for Comcast Business Voice service, and an industrial design that enables you to deploy it on walls, racks, or desktops.Comcast also offers a built-in security system on the device, SecurityEdge. This requires a SecurityEdge subscription. This service automatically blocks such threats as malware, ransomware, phishing, and botnet attacks at the gateway.The Comcast Business Gateway is now available to interested businesses wherever Comcast Business services are offered.Related Stories: More

Huawei Technologies has reported a 28.56% dip in its revenue last year, which saw a sharp decline in its smartphone business. Embattled amidst ongoing US trade sanctions, the Chinese technology vendor is “readjusting” its business portfolio to tap digitalisation and carbon neutrality opportunities.Its 2021 revenue came in at 636.8 billion yuan ($100.01 billion), down from 891.4 billion yuan in 2020. Its net profits, however, climbed 75.9% to 113.7 billion ($17.86 billion), Huawei said Monday. Cash flow from operating activities grew to 59.7 billion yuan ($9.38 billion).At a media briefing, rotating chairman Guo Ping said its carrier business was “stable” while the enterprise business was seeing “steady growth”. Its consumer business had moved into “new domains”, he said. 

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, speaking in an official event for the first time since her return from Canada, said at the briefing that the company was “more capable of dealing with uncertainty” on the back of growing profits and cash flows, despite a drop in its 2021 revenue. The announcement confirmed forecast warnings Guo alluded to last December in his new year message to employees. He had pointed to an unpredictable business environment, “politicisation of technology”, and growing deglobalisation as “serious challenges” the company faced. In an email interview with ZDNet, Huawei executives pointed to “a big decline” in its smartphone business as the key factor behind the drop in overall revenue. Huawei’s president of device business Richard Yu said US sanctions would not stop the Chinese vendor from seeking innovation. Noting that these challenging times eventually would pass, Yu said Huawei would continue to drive customer experience around five key areas including smart home, smart mobility, and entertainment. The company in the past year had looked to diversify its product portfolio, as part of efforts to buffer dwindling smartphone sales amidst ongoing US trade bans. Last June, it released an update of its mobile operating system, HarmonyOS 2, across 100 of its devices in China, including smartphones, smart watches, and tablets. Huawei previously tapped Android as the OS for its smartphones, but was forced to look for alternative platforms when US trade sanctions meant Google had to pull back Huawei’s access to its mobile apps and platform. Pulling aside the drop in smartphone sales, Huawei told ZDNet its “+8” device business–comprising connected products–clocked a sales growth of more than 30% last year. This unit encompassed devices such as wearables and smart screens. The company spokesperson added that it also continued to introduce smartphones last year, including its fourth foldable offering Huawei P50 Pocket. According to Huawei, sales outside of China dropped across the board. It noted that overseas sales accounted for more than half of its carrier business revenue last year. Its increase in net profits was fuelled by the sale of its Honor and server businesses, though, Huawei told ZDNet profits were in part driven by “improved product portfolios” and greater efficiencies from its operations. The vendor reportedly sold its x86 server business, also due to the US trade sanctions, to Henan Information Industry Investment last November.When asked, Huawei declined to provide details, including actual net profits, around the sale of its Honor and server businesses. The company spokesperson, however, noted that its 2021 net profits excluding sales proceeds from the two businesses still were higher than that of 2020. Elaborating on its “improved product offerings”, the Chinese tech giant said it had pumped more investment into its software business and established “domain-specific subsidiaries”, such as its digital power business. Internal teams, including in coal mining and transport, also were integrated to streamline management chains and speed up response to customers’ needs. Huawei further noted that its enterprise business grew last year, with new business segments that included cloud and digital power registering more than 30% growth. While asked, the vendor said it did not separate revenue figures for its cloud and digital power businesses.According to Huawei’s cloud CEO Zhang Pingan, its cloud unit had a network of more than 2.3 million developers, 14,000 consulting partners, and 6,000 technology partners. Collectively, they supported more than 4,500 cloud products. Huawei currently operates 61 availability zones across 27 regions, comprising 170 markets. Its digital power business currently runs 12 research centres in various sites in China, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu said: “When we decided to expand new business domains, we had already fully assessed our ability to secure chip supplies. If we did not feel we could solve this problem, we wouldn’t have made such decisions in the first place.”Pivoting to move with carbon neutrality trendsThe company spokesperson told ZDNet that Huawei would continue to “readjust” its business portfolio in line with digitalisation and carbon neutrality developments, so it could meet customer requirements. “We will focus on connectivity, computing, devices, intelligent automotive components, cloud, and digital power, and work to create thriving OpenHarmony, openEuler, and MindSpore ecosystems,” he said, adding that it would work with partners to deliver these offerings to customers. The Chinese vendor also would invest in three key areas around system architecture optimisation, software performance improvement, and “theoretical exploration”. Specifically, it would seek out breakthroughs in technologies that it had difficulty accessing, the spokesperson said.Noting that it had been denied access to advanced process techniques due to the trade sanctions, Huawei said it would invest more heavily in refactoring basic scientific theory, architecture, and software. These included applying photonic and electronic synergy to communications systems, designing peer-to-peer architectures, and driving higher performance and scalability in software. Such new theories and technologies could include next-generation MIMO (multiple input/output) and wireless artificial intelligence (AI).In particular, it aimed to hit or exceed Shannon’s Limit, which referred to the highest rate of error-free data that could be theoretically transmitted over a communication channel, taking into consideration random transfer error and noise levels. Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei noted that it was investing in 6G research and targeting patents in the next-generation cellular technology. “We must not wait until 6G becomes viable, as waiting would impose constraints on us due to a lack of patents,” Ren said. The company runs 86 technology labs worldwide as well as 23 research and development (R&D) facilities in Europe. It declined to reveal how many R&D centres it had globally. It said its R&D and product reengineering investment climbed by 30% year-on-year. Huawei said it spent 142.7 billion yuan ($22.41 billion) on R&D last year, which accounted for 22.4% of its overall revenue and pushed its 10-year expenditure to 845 billion yuan.  RELATED COVERAGE More

Image: Domino’s
Online orders accounted for nearly 80% of Domino’s total global sales during the 2022 half-year financial results — and the company only expects this number to grow further. Domino’s, which operates in 10 markets globally, has signed a deal with Macquarie Telecom to roll out NBN, VoIP, and SD-WAN with 4G back-up services to more than 720 Domino’s stores across Australia to accommodate for the expected continued growth online. “We want a telco infrastructure solution that’s going to be capable not just for now, with a large percentage of online sales … [but] will grow to the future, that will be reliable for up and downstream for data, and also smarter stores be it technology in-store or out of store that needs to return to base,” Domino’s group chief digital and experience officer Michael Gillespie told ZDNet.The upgrade has been rolled out at 400 sites within five months, with the remaining 320 sites expected to be completed in the next four months. The decision by Domino’s to upgrade its network is also ahead of potential plans by the pizza delivery company to bring drone deliveries to Australia. “We’re not just investing for a telco solution now; we’re looking at the future. We obviously know with a clearer picture where we’re heading … and we’re validating that what we’re doing is allowing a more convenient store over time,” Gillespie said.This year, the company said it will be relaunching trials in New Zealand in partnership with SkyDrop, formerly known as Flirtey. The pair first teamed up in 2016 and completed what they claimed was a world-first pizza drone delivery. “Working with Flirtey, and now SkyDrop, we realised we practically could deliver [using drones] but the actual volume we could deliver in size of order, compared to what the consumers were ordering and moving to in New Zealand, there was a discrepancy,” Gillespie said.”So, we needed to go back and say, okay, how can we work with them on a drone that can carry more and have a few other advances to get a higher commercial volume.”We’ve let SkyDrop do what they do best and now they’ve returned with us to say we’re going to get back into trialling in New Zealand. That’s an exciting message and shows that what we’re doing in this space really is a focus, but we’re not going to do it without the opportunity of validating, ‘Can we get to scale?’.” Gillespie believes that using drone deliveries would complement the company’s existing delivery services. “Sometimes there is a volume of orders that just surpasses what we can even hire to do at the moment. Also, there’s a distance for some customers that we can’t [get to]; we’re all about getting hot, fresh pizza, so can we go further and reach locations which just don’t make sense for the driver to drive to or for the customer because it’ll be a diminished product that is not satisfactory, so robotic delivery comes into that,” he said. Improving the company’s digital connectivity is also expected to underpin the company’s plans to introduce more technologies in-store, and upcoming revamp of its online ordering system that Gillespie described will be “slicker and faster”, featuring service enhancements relating to features such as its e-commerce shopping basket.Related Coverage More