Roads to a better future for Zain and Huawei

KUWAIT: Officials of Zain and Huawei during the first Zain-Huawei Carrier Conference 2018 in Kuwait.

KUWAIT: Zain held the first Zain Huawei Carrier Conference 2018 in Kuwait City last week at Zain HQ. The two companies discussed and explored the new trends, global insights and other topics at the forefront of digital transformation and ICT capability development.

On the sidelines of the conference, Victor (dong Ming), President, Zain Key Account Department in Middle East region, spoke to Kuwait Times about Huawei's vision as a leading global ICT solutions provider and strategic partner with Zain.

Regarding the reasons behind hosting the conference, Victor said Huawei continues exploring and introducing compelling and innovative technologies. "When I came to Kuwait two years ago, I was shocked by the technology development in Kuwait. It was different from what I had in my mind, the improvements equaled what we had in Europe then," he said.

About the 5G network, Victor revealed that Kuwait will be the first to lunch it in the Middle East, stating "Huawei has been the key strategic partner with Zain for nearly 12 years. We built the first 4G network together in Kuwait. Our purpose is to work on a better network for the future of ICT technology development and to reach people's life where Huawei has achieved significant breakthroughs in end-to-end 5G system innovation. We will continue our efforts towards contributing to a unified global standard and achieving a win-win industry chain in close collaboration with the whole industry."

Vision

Regarding Huawei's view and vision, he said that the 5G is promising to be the framework for the connected world, with things, data applications, transport systems and cities seamlessly talking to one another and sharing information to improve quality of life. It will provide massive seamless connectivity for all devices, in hyper real-time speed, and with low latency. This will support countless devices hitting the network and trying to gain access at the same time, as well as support various types of car technology. The 5G is accelerating pace towards a better-connected world. It is widely anticipated that the near future eventually will witness the materialization of new experiences and applications like driverless car, remote surgery, virtual reality, and VR-based immersive entertainment.

He also spoke about the vision of future collaboration between Huawei and Zain saying that both sides are working together to design an innovative network architecture in order to support Zain's digital transformation. The companies signed an MoU to focus on digital transformation and talent development at the MWC2018 in Barcelona. The cooperation will also see both parties focus on exploiting the vast opportunities in cloud services.

Smart city

"Huawei is working on the smart city where most of the city will be smart such as smart parking. CCTV security cameras all over the country will make a safer city. We are in discussion on installing 2,500 CCTV cameras in Kuwait. This technology will not only benefit the government of Kuwait but also private companies who could monitor their goods," he noted.

Victor added that the Kuwaiti market should be more open and give more freedom to operators. "The Kuwait market must expand because I see people want to do something more and we should give them more room to do it. Kuwait needs to host more similar conferences and events and enact laws to protect the operators in order to strengthen the economy. If we stop investing, we will lose our future," he concluded.

Hisham Allam, Chief Technology Officer at Zain Group, said that Huawei as one of Zain's strategic vendors, supplies most of Zain's technology. "We are always looking to improve our services and evaluating the customers' experience ahead of the 5G launch".

Allam said, "We are holding a workshop today which is an annual event. You will also find demos of the latest Huawei's technology and the roadmaps. The new technology will be faster and will provide better services and the after-sales services. The customers can communicate with us through an app and launch complaints if they experience any problem. We will be offering them help if they needed."

He said that a lot of new services are available today. "In order to serve well, we need to see what is the problem. The cooperation between Zain and Huawei will demonstrate the strength of the partnership focusing on developing and improving the products," he added.

By Faten Omar