Germany's Huawei Embrace Signals Bigger Global Shift

Germany will allow Huawei to build out part of its 5G network, the business daily Handelsblatt reported last week after viewing a new draft law that the Angela Merkel government will submit to the Bundestag next month. Japan and South Korea politely but firmly refused to exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant from their networks in October. Among the world's major economies, only the US, UK, India and Taiwan plan to block Huawei 5G equipment. Huawei now has the inside track in the race to develop "Fourth Industrial Revolution" applications that exploit 5G capabilities, including self-programming industrial robots, remote-control mining, "smart city" traffic management, telemedicine, and pandemic control. For example, Huawei expects to add the digitized medical history and real-time health monitoring of half a billion people outside China to its Cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems during the 2020s. China's dominance in 5G, moreover, gives it a head start in developing next phase 6G broadband. The German decision not to block any particular equipment provider from its 5G buildout was widely expected after Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the US presidential election. Biden's advisers have stated in the past that it is unrealistic to try to exclude billions of Huawei users from global communications networks. Read Full Article »