Huawei bucks the trend with 35 per cent increase

NEVER MIND the world going into meltdown, China's Huawei bucked the trend and announced a 35 per cent sales increase. Plus it's just landed a contract in Ericsson's back yard from Teliasonera.

Huawei's Xu Zhijun claimed that it has been shielded from the crisis through a reliance on emerging markets. Yet it has scored a major victory in Europe by securing the contract - alongside Ericsson - to build an LTE (Long Term Evolution), ie 4G, network in Oslo for TeliaSonera.

It's a historic moment not only for Huawei but also for Japan's NTT DoCoMo. Until now, DoCoMo had always been way ahead in cellular technology - offering 3G first, for example. Teliasonera should have a commercial LTE network going by 2010.

It's interesting that neither Huawei or Ericsson gave an actual figure for how fast the LTE network will actually be, although Ericsson said it would be roughly ten times faster than today's mobile broadband.

So that's 720 Mbit/s, then. Not the 100 Mbit/s which has always been bandied about for LTE. Naturally Ericsson said LTE will make things better for social networking. All those video uploads consume bandwidth, don't they?

Huawei has been hotly tipped to make some sort of deal with Nortel. However, the Chinese firm just scored a contract in Costa Rica so it doesn't really need Nortel's American contacts.

Plus Huawei has just delivered the first batch of CDMA 2000 base stations for China Telecoms' Chinese 3G networks. So it doesn't need Nortel's CDMA expertise either.

The INQ was just looking through the specs proposed by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) for LTE and noticed there's supposed to be support for 1 Gbit/s in hot spots. The vendors have gone a bit quiet about that one. µ