Huawei to develop safe city solutions with government
Huawei signed a strategic alliance with Malta to establish an innovation center in that country focused on safe city solutions including nationwide surveillance. In July 2015, Huawei and the Malta government signed a memorandum of understanding, which led to the opening of a Huawei office in Malta.
“The new innovation center will leverage on Malta’s research talents and on Huawei’s best of breed technologies and innovations to develop smart and safe cities solutions that will represent key assets for public administrations to prevent and react to evolving threats,” Huawei officials said in a statement. “These innovative safe city, all-in-one, nationwide safety and surveillance plan, will combine alarm reporting, data transmission, video surveillance, transport management, police scheduling, wired-wireless communications, and voice and video conferencing technologies.”
Huawei recently signed a smart city project agreement with the Autonomous Region of Sardinia in Italy. To date, Huawei’s safe city solutions have served more than 400 million people in 100 cities across 30 countries.
3 Sweden launches VoWi-Fi service
In other EMEA news, Swedish mobile operator 3 Sweden announced the launch of voice-over-Wi-Fi service designed to allow subscribers with poor indoor coverage to connect mobile phones to local Wi-Fi networks. The service is provided at no extra cost to the company’s postpaid mobile subscribers. The carrier claims to be the first mobile operator in Sweden to launch the Wi-Fi calling service.
“Indoor coverage is a challenge for all mobile networks. We know there are Swedes who have problems with their indoor coverage and therefore we have worked intensively with both technology vendors and handset manufacturers to launch Wi-Fi calls,” said 3 Sweden CEO Nicholas Hogberg.
The telco launched commercial LTE services in 2011, currently supporting the network through spectrum in the 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands.
