Huawei makes three-year, $4B bet on wireline broadband R&D

Huawei sees great potential in the wireline broadband market, so much so that it announced that it will invest $4 billion in conducting new research and development in the area through 2017.

The Shenzhen-based vendor said during the Ultra-Broadband Forum in London that its investment will focus on products that will provide an "improved service experience for end-users."  

Under the three-year plan, Huawei plans to continue to expand R&D around software defined networking (SDN), ultra-broadband technologies such as vectoring and NG-PON and optical networking technologies.

Although Huawei has become well known as a major wireless network infrastructure provider, Ryan Ding, president of Huawei Products and Solutions, said the company "recognizes Fixed Broadband as a key direction for strategic investment and will continue to increase the scale of investment in related technologies, core products and solutions."

What's driving its investment plans are the emerging advent of 4K video and building a robust wireline-based backhaul network to handle mobile network operators' ongoing deployments of 4G LTE and future 5G services.

These investments also come at a time when Huawei's key competitors are gaining momentum in broadband infrastructure, particularly in emerging areas such as VDSL2 and vectoring. During the second quarter, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) took the lead in the VDSL port race over its two top vendor competitors, Huawei  and Adtran, according to a Dell'Oro report.

For more:
- see the release
- Reuters has this article

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