Oz, who co-founded the fintech with Irfan Khan in 2020, will be based in Malaysia
Recognised as a banking industry thought leader in digital technology & sustainability
UK-based embedded services provider mmob Ltd has announced the appointment of Arsalaan (Oz) Ahmed (pic) as its executive chairman. Oz, who co-founded the company with mmob CEO Irfan Khan…Continue Reading
Was CEO of Tune Talk since Jan 2018 and previously had one year stint as redONE CEO
Aims to help grow market share in prepaid segment, sees significant growth opportunities
redONE Network Sdn Bhd has appointed Ameen Amaendran (pic), who had been CEO of TuneTalk since Jan 2018, as its new CEO for…Continue Reading
Huawei is moving ahead into the 5.5G era, a marked advance over current 5G networks and a practical halfway house on the road to 6G. Also known as 5G-Advanced, 5.5G promises big improvements in factory automation, autonomous driving and various other applications.
At the company’s 14th Global Mobile Broadband Forum held on October 10-11 in Dubai, Huawei’s President of Wireless Solution Cao Ming announced “the industry’s first full-series solutions for 5.5G,” which he said “will help operators deliver full-scenario tenfold capabilities and enable ultra-high energy efficiency, spectrum utilization, and O&M [operations & maintenance] efficiency.”
Huawei has been working on 5.5G with network operators China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Saudi Telecommunications Company and the UAE’s du. At the forum, Huawei and du showed participants their 5G-Advanced demonstration smart home.
Technology market research organization Counterpoint explains that “Compared to conventional 5G, 5.5G represents a tenfold improvement in performance across the board. This means that 5.5G networks will be able to provide ubiquitous 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink speeds while supporting 100 billion IoT connections – compared to just 10 billion with 5G.
“In addition, 5.5G is expected to deliver latency and positioning accuracy that are a fraction of the current 5G standard as well as significant reductions in overall network power consumption.”
Huawei’s main network competitors, Nokia and Ericsson, are also working on 5.5G. Ericsson says, “Get ready for more sustainable and intelligent mobile networks and enhanced support for services and applications such as the metaverse, industry wireless sensors, and accurate positioning virtual reality.”
According to Nokia, “5G-Advanced is set to evolve 5G to its fullest, richest capabilities. It will create a foundation for more demanding applications and a wider range of use cases… with a truly immersive user experience based on extended reality (XR) features.” It will also be backward compatible, Nokia says.
By facilitating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning across networks, Nokia expects 5G-Advanced to enhance the performance of industrial automation and autonomous robots, logistics, autonomous vehicles and drones, and power grid control.
It will also support massive low-cost IoT (Internet of Things) networks and public services such as railway systems and smart city management.
Huawei first proposed 5.5G/5G-Advanced at its 11th Global Mobile Broadband Forum in 2020. It was designated as the second phase of 5G by 3GPP (the 3rd Generation Partnership Project), an international association of seven telecommunications standard development organizations, in 2021.
In July 2022, Huawei executive director David Wang introduced the company’s 5G-Advanced innovation roadmap, noting that “AI will be fully integrated into enterprise production processes, and the size of the 5.5G IoT market will grow rapidly.
“Collaboration between robots and people in complex scenarios will impose greater requirements on next-generation industrial field networks.”
At the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain, from February 27 to March 2, 2023. Huawei stated that “5.5G will expand on 5G, but will be faster, more automated and more intelligent than 5G, and support more frequency bands.
“5.5G will deliver 10 times greater network capabilities, which will translate into 100 times more opportunities. Free-viewpoint video, enterprise cloudification, mobile private networks, passive IoT, and integrated sensing and communication will all develop rapidly thanks to these advances in 5G.”
Four months later, during the Mobile World Congress Shanghai at the end of June 2023, Huawei announced plans to launch a complete set of commercial 5.5G network equipment in 2024.
Despite being progressively excluded from the US and its allies in Europe and Asia, Huawei is securely positioned as the leading telecom equipment provider in China, which is both the world’s largest industrial economy and well ahead in 5G deployment.
By the end of September 2023, China had built 3.2 million 5G base stations and had nearly 740 million 5G users accounting for half the world total, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
More than 20,000 5G-enabled industry virtual private networks had been established by the end of last month. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan calls for more than 10,000 5G-enabled factories to be built by the end of 2025.
Nokia and Ericsson will not be allowed to compete for much of China’s market. With time, they can be expected to regain their former dominance in Europe as the EU and UK apply “rip and replace” policies to Chinese telecom equipment, but European economies and investment are currently weak.
Ericsson has its own 5G smart factory in the US, but the country is lagging behind Europe in industrial 5G deployment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, notes:
“The United States faces a large and growing gap with China in radio frequency spectrum allocated for 5G wireless communications, particularly mid-band spectrum bands licensed for wide-area coverage, which constitute the primary arteries of the 5G economy and the broader global ecosystem of wireless connectivity.
“The United States needs to move urgently to allocate more mid-band spectrum for licensed commercial 5G use. If it does not do so, the US spectrum shortage will hinder technological innovation and give China an open path to global leadership in the connected future of the twenty-first century, threatening the economic and national security of the United States.”
Optimists in the US say that sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry will stymie the advance of Chinese telecommunications technology, but there is no evidence this is happening so far.
According to the MIIT, China has already established a nearly complete supply chain for 5G networks, has more than 40% of the world’s 5G-related patents and has completed all 5.5G/5G-Advanced technical performance tests. Huawei itself has already built its first 5G-Advanced industrial production line.
As reported by China’s Communist Party-run Global Times, MIIT will continue to accelerate 5G applications in fields such as manufacturing, mining, electric power and port management, and explore new applications in healthcare, education and other sectors. 5G has been extended to 67 of the 97 major Chinese economic categories, MIIT says.
With time, these applications will be upgraded to 5.5G, which Huawei will also deliver to the Middle East and other places resistant to US pressure.
Follow this writer on Twitter: @ScottFo83517667
Potential to develop impactful innovations to meet energy transition
Committed to building partnerships locally, and regionally for startups
PETRONAS’ accelerator programme, Petronas FutureTech 3.0 selected at its Demo Day today 10 technology-driven startups that have shown the most potential in developing impactful, future-focused and sustainable innovations which are able to meet energy transition…Continue Reading
Investors from the Middle East, SEA & Japan also participated in this round
Funds will enable global expansion and streamline REC issuance and digitisation
Redex, Asia’s leading Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) solutions provider, announced the completion of its US$ 10 million (RM47.6 million) Series A funding round, with Aramco Ventures as the lead…Continue Reading
7 in 10 newly constructed Grade-A buildings in APAC are green-certified
Over half a billion square feet of Grade A office space in the region built before 2011
Major cities in Asia Pacific will be faced with a demand-supply gap for net zero-carbon-ready workplaces as corporate net-zero targets loom, according to new research…Continue Reading
Brings 3 decades of experience and hand in over 40 acquisitions to the table
Vote of confidence in goal to build Xamble into a pan-SEA influencer platform
Malaysian-based Xamble Group (which used to be called Netccentric Ltd) which is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange has announced that it has entered into a…Continue Reading
Where is the text you’re reading, right now? In one sense, it lives “on the internet” or “in the cloud”, just like your favorite social media platform or the TV show you might stream tonight.
But in a physical sense, it’s stored and transmitted somewhere in a network of thousands of data centers across the globe. Each of these centers is whirring, buzzing and beeping around the clock, to store, process and communicate vast amounts of data and provide services to hungry consumers.
All this infrastructure is expensive to build and run, and has a considerable environmental impact. In search of cost savings, greater sustainability and better service, data center providers are looking to get their feet wet.
Tech giant Microsoft and other companies want to relocate data centers into the world’s oceans, submerging computers and networking equipment to take advantage of cheap real estate and cool waters. Is this a good thing? What about the environmental impact? Are we simply replacing one damaging practice with another?
Microsoft’s Project Natick has been pursuing the idea of data centers beneath the waves since 2014. The initial premise was that since many humans live near the coast, so should data centers.
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An initial experiment in 2015 saw a small-scale data center deployed for three months in the Pacific Ocean.
A two-year follow-up experiment began in 2018. A total of 864 servers, in a 12 by 3 meter tubular structure, were sunk 35 meters deep off the Orkney Islands in Scotland.
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Microsoft is not the only company experimenting with moving data underwater. Subsea Cloud is another American company doing so. China’s Shenzhen HiCloud Data Center Technology Co Ltd has deployed centers in tropical waters off the coast of Hainan Island.
Underwater data centers promise several advantages over their land-locked cousins.
1) Energy efficiency
The primary benefit is a significant cut in electricity consumption. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers consume around 1–1.5% of global electricity use, of which some 40% is used for cooling.
Data centers in the ocean can dissipate heat in the surrounding water. Microsoft’s center uses a small amount of electricity for cooling, while Subsea Cloud’s design has an entirely passive cooling system.
2) Reliability
The Microsoft experiment also found the underwater center had a boost in reliability. When it was brought back to shore in 2020, the rate of server failures was less than 20% that of land-based data centers.
This was attributed to the stable temperature on the sea floor and the fact oxygen and humidity had been removed from the tube, which likely decreased corrosion of the components. The air inside the tube had also been replaced with nitrogen, making fires impossible.
Another reason for the increased reliability may have been the complete absence of humans, which prevents the possibility of human error impacting the equipment.
3) Latency
More than one-third of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of a coast. Locating data centers close to where people live reduces the time taken for data to reach them, known as “latency.”
Offshore data centers can be close to coastal consumers, reducing latency, without having to pay the high real-estate prices often found in densely populated areas.
4) Increased security and data sovereignty
Moving data centers into the ocean makes them physically more difficult for hackers or saboteurs to access. It can also make it easier for companies to address “data sovereignty” concerns, in which certain countries require certain data to be stored within their borders rather than transmitted overseas.
5) Cost
Alongside savings due to reduced power bills, fewer hardware failures, and the low price of offshore real estate, the way underwater data centers are built may also cut costs.
The centers can be made in a modular, mass-produced fashion using standardized components and shipped ready for deployment. There is also no need to consider the comfort or practicality for human operators to interact with the equipment.
At present there is no evidence placing data centers in the world’s oceans will have any significant negative impact. Microsoft’s experiments showed some localized warming, but “the water just meters downstream of a Natick vessel would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most.”
The Microsoft findings also showed the submerged data center provided habitat to marine life, much like a shipwreck:
[…] crabs and fish began to gather around the vessel within 24 hours. We were delighted to have created a home for those creatures.
If underwater data centers go ahead, robust planning will be needed to ensure their placement follows best practice considering cultural heritage and environmental values.
There are also opportunities to enhance the environmental benefits of underwater data centers by incorporating nature-positive features in the design to enhance marine biodiversity around these structures.
Several companies are actively exploring, or indeed constructing, underwater data centers. While the average end-user will have no real awareness of where their data are stored, organizations may soon have opportunities to select local, underwater cloud platforms and services.
Companies with a desire to shout about their environmental credentials may well seek out providers that offer greener data centers – a change that is likely to only accelerate the move to the ocean.
So far, it looks like this approach is practical and can be scaled up. Add in the environmental and economic savings and this may well be the future of data centers for a significant proportion of the planet.
Paul Haskell-Dowland is Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University and Kathryn McMahon is Deputy Director, Center for Marine Ecosystems Research, and Associate Dean of Research, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
99% of respondents recognised that technical debt is a risk to their organisations
Lack of awareness significantly affects leaders’ ability to manage technical debt
A study of business leaders by DXC Technology, a leading Fortune 500 global technology services company, has revealed that nearly half (46%) of executives say that technical debt, or…Continue Reading
70% in favour of ASEAN-wide treaty to realise a common power grid
44% believe the energy transition will occur at the cost of economic growth
84% of industry practitioners called for new governance frameworks and standards to manage the carbon intensity of energy, including the implementation of carbon taxes and incentives for green…Continue Reading