Chinese telecom giant Huawei wants to make Aust'n cities "smarter," "safer"

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has flagged its intentions to work with the Australian government as public safety looms as an important issue to the nation.

The multinational networking giant, which provides global information and communications technology solutions, publicized its plans to launch new systems in Australia, which are designed to make the country's cities "smarter" and "safer."

Joe So, Huawei's chief technology officer of industry solutions in the company's enterprise business group, said Huawei's relationship with the Australia's federal government had vastly improved.

"It is a matter of trust with Australia. I think the Australian government has a lot more trust in us today than before. I would love to offer Australia our public safety solution. Huawei is ready," So told The Australian newspaper on Tuesday.

The public safety solution includes Huawei's "Smart City" and "Safe City" platforms, which have already served more than 100 cities in more than 30 countries, according to So.

Huawei's Smart Cities is a portfolio of the company's ICT-enabled solutions for sensing, analysing and integrating the key information of a city's core operating systems. Huawei Smart City consists of Smart Government, Smart Industry, and Smart Life.

In its Safe City solution, Huawei uses data, analysis and technology to enable the government to gain a comprehensive "view" of the city and to build a system for urban public safety.

So said the platform would be a great fit for Australia, as public safety is a major issue facing the country.

"Public safety is going to be one of the major issues for Australia because of where you stand in the world, with the position that you have with the US," he said on Tuesday.

So said issues with data storage and retrieval meant ­incident data was often too slow to reach command staff.

"A lot of governments today, like in Australia, have so much data they don't know what to do with it because they are not linked together," he said. "What you need to do in the ­future is build a system to link all the governments (and) all the big data together."

So also disputed any doubts over the company's alleged security problems.

"A lot of people come to us and asked about the security issue with the company. But who are the most technical companies in the world? Telcos. We have been serving 350 telcos in the world. If we had any problem with our network in terms of security, it would be known by the 350 operators in the world already. It has never been proven we have security leaks or anything wrong with our systems," he told The Australian.

Huawei is already working in Melbourne with Victorian government owned company, South East Water, on technologies allowing for data, analysis and management of the sewer networks. Endit