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Huawei Technologies is keen to tap growing demand for clean energy and IT sustainability, as organisations and nations across the globe set carbon neutrality goals. The Chinese technology giant has carved out a new subsidiary with dedicated resources to develop low-carbon systems, which can be deployed in various market segments such as data centres and electric vehicles.Set up in June 2021, Huawei Digital Power Technologies is tasked with driving clean energy and the digitalisation of traditional energy, It will work to build products that integrate digital and power electronics technologies, said Sun Bohan, Asia-Pacific president of Huawei Digital Power, in a video interview with ZDNet.He noted that carbon neutrality had become a shared target for more than 140 markets, of which 12 had issued new laws to achieve their goals, while four had proposed similar legislations and another 37 had issued related policies. 

Singapore puts budget focus on transformation, innovation

After tilting last year’s budget towards ’emergency support’ in light of the global pandemic, Singapore’s government will spend SG$24 billion ($18.1 billion) over the next three years to help local businesses innovate and build capabilities needed to take them through the next phase of transformation.

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These global targets as well as market demand had guided Huawei Digital Power to work on products that facilitated low-carbon environments across different scenarios, including green data centres, cities, campuses, buildings, and factories,  Sun said. He noted that 60% of Huawei’s overall research and development (R&D) team are part of Digital Power. Setting up a separate business unit enabled the vendor to establish specific R&D work and integrate product features that catered to specific deployment requirements across various markets, so they could better meet their carbon neutrality targets, he said. Asked about the subsidiary’s revenue and customer base since its inception in June, the Huawei executive declined to provide details, but said he hoped to provide some indicative figures next year.  Speaking at COP26 last month, Huawei Digital Power’s vice president and CMO Fang Liangzhou said technology advancements were integral to combating climate change and decarbonisation. 

He noted that electricity and transportation were amongst the main sources of global carbon emissions, accounting for 40% and 21%, respectively, of total emissions. Citing figures from International Energy Agency, Fang added that the ICT industry consumed 4% of global electricity. This underscored the importance of low-carbon power generation and electric energy consumption in achieving carbon neutrality, he said, adding that Huawei Digital Power aimed to drive clean power generation. This included smart photovoltaic (PV) systems designed for renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and energy storage. According to Sun, the Chinese vendor currently is working with several customers in this region on the development of smart PV farms. In Singapore, for example, Huawei’s string inverters were installed on Sunseap Group’s floating solar platform, next to the PV panels, which bypassed the need for a direct current (DC) cable line and DC combiner boxes. This reduced costs and deployment time, Huawei said. The five-hectare Sunseap floating solar farm comprises 13,312 panels, 40 inverters, and more than 30,000 floats. It is projected to generate up to 6.02 million kWh of energy per year, enough to power 1,250 four-room HDB flats in Singapore and offset  an estimated 4,258 tons of carbon dioxide. Huawei Digital Power also recently inked a deal with Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand (CP) to install PV panels on the rooftops of 1,300 7-Eleven stores. CP is the sole operator of the convenience stores in Thailand. Towards zero-carbon data centresAsked what were key barriers to achieving carbon neutrality, Sun said the long process of developing and replacing traditional energy with clean energy alternatives would prove challenging for many markets, especially developing nations. He added that the cost of producing clean energy components, especially solar and wind, would need to be reduced to accelerate adoption. Noting that the cost of materials had increased recently, he said the price of PV panels, for instance, had more than doubled year-on-year and this had a significant impact on the industry. He also pointed to the need to bring down the cost of energy storage systems, so the industry could move from unstable to stable power, which was an important component for clean energy materials. Developing low-carbon energy sources and technologies that consumed less power were key to achieving carbon neutrality targets, Sun said, adding that this drove much of Huawei Digital Power’s research efforts. Data centres, in particular, was a key focus, as these facilities consumed large amounts of electricity and more would need to be built to support growing adoption of online services, he said. Power tariffs and energy consumption account for more 60% of the overall cost of running a data centre, he added.Responding to ZDNet’s question on whether it was possible to operate zero-carbon data centres, Sun said the key catalyst for this would be the ability to power these facilities completely on clean energy such as solar or wind. However, he noted that Huawei’s internal research revealed it currently would require significantly large hectares of PV plants just to power one data centre. While existing technology meant it would be challenging to run zero-carbon data centres, he said this might be possible in future as the technology continued to advance. Overall efficiencies of operating these sites and system-level capabilities also would need to be improved, he added. Artificial intelligence (AI), for instance, should be tapped to help enhance operational efficiencies and reduce energy consumption. He noted that telcos currently use AI to better optimise their base stations to user demand, hence, reducing power consumption and cutting their annual electricity tariffs by 15% to 17%. In addition, systems deployed in data centres could be more compact, with higher density, so the overall efficiencies of a data centre could be improved. According to Huawei, as of June 2021, it helped its customers generate 403.4 billion kWh of green power, save 12.4 billion kWh of electricity, and reduce carbon emissions by 200 million tons.RELATED COVERAGE More

Amazon Web Services on Thursday launched a preview of AWS Cloud WAN, a service to build, manage, and monitor global private wide area networks (WAN) using AWS. The service is for organizations that need to manage globally dispersed networks. “Imagine you’re a large global company with dozens of manufacturing sites round the world… — you need to connect them all to AWS,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said during his re:Invent keynote address. Cloud WAN provides a central dashboard where customers can define network policies for a global network spanning multiple locations and networks. Customers can specify whether their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premise locations should connect through AWS VPN or third-party software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) products. Cloud WAN “actually builds it for you in minutes using the big AWS backbone for you, to give you a highly reliable, highly available, software-defined wide area network running over AWS infrastructure,” Vogels said. Customers also segment pieces of their SDN, creating one network, for example, for manufacturing sites and one for offices. These segments would not be able to communicate with each other unless explicitly allowed. The service includes a dashboard for monitoring network health, security, and performance.

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One of the notable announcements at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent 2021 conference today was the unveiling of AWS Private 5G, a fully-managed service enabling businesses to deploy their own high-capacity mobile networks. The service is designed to be used inside buildings as an augmentation of — and eventual replacement for — Wi-Fi. 

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Businesses have a strong interest in 5G, but the deployment model is challenging. Racking and stacking equipment from carrier-class companies is overkill for most businesses and takes months to get up and running. Using a service provider might be easier, but that has its challenges — such as data ownership, the cost of the service, and the carrier’s footprint. A better approach is private 5G, where the IT department can deploy and manage the networks itself, but few options have been available. Until now.The newly announced Private 5G product is a turnkey service that’s managed through the AWS console. Users specify where they want to build a network and what capacity is needed, and AWS ships the required hardware and SIM cards. The network auto-configures and can be used anywhere from traditional corporate offices to factory floors to large campuses. As is the case with all things AWS, the company has attempted to take the complexity and unnecessary costs out of the infrastructure they sell. The portal-based approach removes the long planning cycles and multi-vendor integrations usually required. As for costs, AWS has disrupted markets with utilization-based pricing, and they’re doing the same here. Provision as many devices as needed, pay only for bandwidth

Customers can provision as many 5G connected devices as they want, they will only pay for the bandwidth they use. The traditional pricing model would be a per-SIM fee, but that can be highly inefficient for IoT because many devices use very little bandwidth. For example, a connected industrial copier might only send toner volumes once a day. With a per-month cost model, the business may be paying $10 per month. With capacity pricing, this cloud costs as little as a couple of cents a day. During his first re:Invent keynote as CEO, AWS’s Adam Selipsky talked about the importance of this approach. “AWS Private 5G is a one-stop shop to manage private cellular networks,” Selipsky said. “It lets customers start small and scale up as needed with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You just pop the SIM cards into your devices and, voila, everything is connected.”As is the case with most AWS technologies, one of the first customers is Amazon itself. The Private 5G service is used in the Amazon Fulfillment Centers (FCs) to speed up product delivery. 

Amazon uses robots to scan packages and manage millions of items daily. Before 5G, the company had to deploy Wi-Fi; while that technology is common, it’s notoriously flaky. It can also be expensive to extend to outdoor locations, since it requires cables and power lines to be run to light poles to connect the APs. With 5G, outdoor small cells can be mounted in the corner of a warehouse, for example, making deployment faster but also resulting in more consistent performance. Cellular is considerably more reliable than Wi-Fi. At re:Invent, AWS also announced Private 5G networks for Koch Industries and Dish Network. There weren’t many details on the deployments, but both companies talked about wanting the benefits of 5G without the deployment headaches. In the short term, I do not expect private 5G to “globally displace Wi-Fi” as Pat Gelsinger predicted in his last VMworld keynote. I do expect to see it being used in mission-critical environments where Wi-Fi is too unreliable; 5G also will take wireless to places where Wi-Fi cannot be easily extended.Long term, as the cost of SIM-connected devices decreases and eSIMs become more common, the industry could see an even bigger move from Wi-Fi to 5G. Stay tuned.

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Image: Starlink
The India Department of Telecommunications has warned its citizens on Friday evening not to purchase Starlink services as SpaceX is not licensed to sell satellite internet on the subcontinent. The warning was issued after the department noted that SpaceX was pre-selling Starlink services in India on its site. “Accordingly, the government has asked the company to comply with the Indian regulatory framework for rendering the satellite based communication services and refrain from booking/rendering the satellite internet services in India with immediate effect,” it said. “Given the fact that Starlink is not a licensee, the public is advised not to subscribe to Starlink services being advertised.” During 2021, SpaceX has missed its own deadlines for September and October to exit its beta phase. The company currently states that users should “expect” speeds of 100Mbps to 200Mbps down, and latency of 20 milliseconds “in most locations”. Sometime next year, Japanese telco KDDI is set to use Starlink to provide backhaul service for some of its mobile towers.

Meanwhile in India, the BBC reported last week that New Delhi was set to ban all private cryptocurrencies, in favour of an official digital currency issued by the nation’s Reserve Bank. Related Coverage More

Dell Technologies saw strong third quarter growth from its commercial and consumer PC units as well as solid demand for its data center gear. The company delivered the best third quarter in its history with revenue of $28.4 billion, up 21% from a year ago, with earnings of $3.9 billion, or $4.87 a share. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.37 a share. Analysts were expecting Dell to report third quarter revenue of $26.82 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $2.18 a share. Dell’s client solutions group revenue was $16.5 billion in the third quarter, up 35% from a year ago. Operating income for the third quarter was $1.1 billion. Commercial revenue was $12.3 billion, up 40% from a year ago. Consumer revenue was $4.3 billion, up 21%. The company said it saw strong PC demand for commercial systems, high-end consumer units and gaming. HP also delivered strong quarterly results. On a conference call with analysts, Jeffrey Clarke, vice chairman of Dell Technologies, said:In client, we are pairing Windows 11 with our Dell Optimizer built-in intelligence to deliver the most personalized productive computing experience on the world’s most intelligent business PCs. We believe the introduction of Windows 11 will continue to drive demand in PCs.On the infrastructure side, Dell delivered third quarter revenue of $8.4 billion, up 5% from a year ago. Storage revenue was up 1% with server and networking sales of $4.5 billion, up 9% from a year ago.×dell-technologies-strategy.png

Chuck Whitten, co-COO for Dell Technologies, said:Demand for our solutions remains strong as global economic recovery and widespread digital transformation reset IT demand to higher levels. Against that backdrop and despite the difficult supply environment, we again delivered great performance in Q3, with strong growth in all 3 business units, all regions and broad strength across our commercial PC, server and notably, most of our storage portfolio. We gained share in servers, storage and PCs, according to the latest reported IDC results. As we look forward, all signposts point to continued strong market demand, and we intend to continue winning in the consolidation and gaining share over the long term. Our strategy is not just to win in the consolidation but also to modernize our business, and our APEX-branded solutions are important to that future. Though it is still early days, we’re pleased with our technical progress and the momentum across our family of as-a-service offerings, which will continue to expand going forward.×dell-q3-2022.pngRecent Dell headlines: More

A number of market forces are shaping dramatic changes in the edge, internet of things (IoT), and networking triad. These forces include demand for greater sustainability, closing the digital divide, the ongoing chip shortage, and, at a broader level, the COVID-19 pandemic. Our 2022 predictions for Edge, IoT, and networking take all of these forces into account and focus on the three technologies’ role in either addressing the issues or being hampered by them. Here is a look at three of the bold calls we’re making for Edge, IoT, and networking in 2022: Edge and IoT will drive new solutions for scope 3 emission reduction: Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions that come from assets an organization doesn’t directly own or control and form most of the carbon footprint in most industries. Emerging technology can help address these issues. In 2022, demand for sustainability-related services powered by edge and IoT will grow for energy efficiency and resource management. High-demand use cases will include environmental monitoring, resource management, and supply chain processes. Satellite internet will challenge 5G as the connectivity of choice: The advent of satellite internet will help address the digital divide in 2022. Forrester predicts that 85% of satellite users will be in rural locations, with remote worker initiatives and remote facilities benefiting significantly from satellite internet next year, as well. But will it rise to be a challenger for 5G? 5G at scale has the potential to influence all walks of life and tremendously influence every industry vertical. The practical timeline of 5G and logistical challenges, however, will temper the enthusiasm. The massive infrastructure needed to realize all touted 5G use cases has created the elephant in the room that no telecommunications manufacturer or network provider wants to address. The chip shortage will impede overall IoT market growth by 10% to 15%: The global chip shortage won’t ease soon. Forrester predicts that this dilemma won’t be resolved until mid-2023. Since chips form the backbone of every intelligent device, this threatens the growth of other emerging technologies, as well. IoT devices will feel the pinch particularly hard because they generally use a mature sensor, microcontroller, and communications technologies that have significantly more availability issues than advanced chips like CPUs and GPUs. We predict that the IoT chip shortage will shave 10% to 15% off of IoT growth in 2022. Learn more about Forrester predictions here.This post was written by Analyst Abhijit Sunil, and it originally appeared here.

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Life360, a family-oriented location-sharing app, plans to acquire Tile for $205 million, the companies announced Monday. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2022. By acquiring Tile, which makes Bluetooth-enabled finding devices trackers, Life360 will gain access to a broad swath of customers. Tile’s technology is embedded in more than 50 different third-party devices, like wireless earbuds, headphones, laptops and dog collars. More than one million third-party devices already have activated Tile technology. Meanwhile, Tile devices are sold directly to consumers via more than 27,000 brick and mortar stores. Additionally, both companies have significant paid subscription services, and the acquisition is expected to increase Life360’s paid subscriber base by about 45% to around 1.6 million people. “Life360 is on a mission to simplify safety so families can live fully. With the acquisition of Tile, we will now be able to provide a unique and all-encompassing solution for finding the people, pets and things that families care about most,” Chris Hulls, Co-Founder and CEO of Life360, said in a statement. “This acquisition marks a key step forward towards Life360 achieving its vision of being the world’s leading platform for safety and location services.” The deal will also help Tile, months after Apple became a direct competitor with the AirTag tracker. The Apple device leverages the Find My network to privately crowdsource the location of tags. Tile’s network works in a similar fashion but falls short of what Apple offers with the Find My network. However, Life360 said its global footprint will significantly expand the reach of Tile’s Finding Network. The addition of Life360’s network of 33 million smartphone users is expected to increase the reach of Tile’s Finding Network by about 10x.After the deal closes, Tile will continue to operate with its own brand identity under the leadership of Tile CEO CJ Prober, who will also join the Life360 Board of Directors. The Tile team is expected to remain in place. More

StarHub has unveiled a five-year business transformation plan that will see the Singapore telco focus on becoming a “full-on digital life” and digital services provider. It also is aiming for a further cost savings of SG$280 million ($205.54 million) and SG$220 million ($161.5 million) in gross profit growth cumulatively between 2022 and 2026. Coining it “DARE+”, StarHub said Monday it concluded the first phase of its DARE transformation journey last month, which yielded cost savings in excess of SG$270 million ($198.2 million) and was higher than its original target of SG$210 million. It also slashed its operating expenditure by 15%. The telco now would look to attain “sustainable revenue growth”, “potential growth” in dividends, and product margins with the introduction of 5G products and services. It also was aiming for further operating cost savings with its digital transformation efforts and migration from legacy systems. 

These efforts would drive its target of achieving SG$280 million in cost savings as well as SG$220 million in gross profit growth over its fiscal years of 2022 to 2026. StarHub said its five-year “transformation and growth” roadmap would see the telco become a company “that connects digital lives” for customers. “DARE+ anchors on doubling down on digital across everything StarHub does, accelerating value creation, realising growth without frontiers, and delivering an endless continuum of experiences that enrich customers’ lives,” it said. CEO Nikhil Eapen said: “StarHub is changing, going beyond telco to becoming a full-on digital life and digital services provider of the most enriching connectivity, entertainment, and other lifestyle experiences, as well as innovative business solutions for our customers, with frictionless digital engagement at our core.”With DARE+, StarHub said it would offer over-the-top (OTT) streaming entertainment, cloud games, and digital services. For consumers, this would see the telco “meshing” its products and services into all-in-one offerings. For instance, shows and movies could be accessed on TVs, phones, tablets, and web browsers through its hybrid linear-OTT platform StarHub TV+. 

It pay TV business also has been rebranded to Entertainment to encompass other complementary services, such as 5G cloud games, and new products and verticals that the telco planned to introduce in future. In the enterprise market, StarHub pointed to plans to beef up its play in cybersecurity and the region’s ICT industry through Ensign InfoSecurity, its joint venture with Temasek Holdings, and subsidiary Strateq, as well as planned acquisitions of MyRepublic Broadband and HKBN JOS in Singapore and Malaysia. StarHub added that it would explore further potential acquisitions to further grow its footprint, but did not specify market segments it was looking at.The telco is the latest amongst local players to embark on a business transformation plan in recent years, following similar announcements from M1 and Singtel. All three telcos also saw leadership changes in the last three years, with StarHub’s Eapen taking on the CEO role last December, after a months-long search. Singtel’s group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon assumed his position in January this year, while M1 CEO Manjot Singh Mann took over the helm in December 2018.RELATED COVERAGE More