Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, #Ren#Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment.
He called it #Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.”
Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder.
The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field.
“Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves:
a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along.
For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the #Chinese#government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones.
(In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.)
With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival #ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market.
Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of #stolen#intellectual#property,
a charge the company denies.
“If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group.
But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from #Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.”
More recently, in February, the US #Department of #Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.”
The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing.
One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was #Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada.
But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying.
Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been #downloading hundreds of #documents from the company.
“There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says.
Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
It had failed to adapt, disappointed its customers, and was ill-prepared to respond to new Chinese competition.
And there was that hack.
Huawei seized the moment.
Nortel's most valuable asset was the unmatched talent in its Ottawa research lab, known as the Canadian equivalent of the legendary Bell Labs.
For years, Huawei had been building up its research capacity, trying to shed its reputation as a low-cost provider whose tech came from purloining the discoveries of others. It had a number of R&D labs around the world.
Now, with Nortel's demise, it could pursue a bigger prize than market share:
technical mastery. And respect.
The head of research at Nortel's lab in Ottawa, #Wen#Tong, grew up in China and joined Nortel's wireless lab in 1995 after earning a doctorate at Concordia University in Montreal.
He had contributed to every generation of mobile technology and held 470 patents in the US.
If telecommunications companies staged a research scientist draft in 2009, Wen Tong would have been a first-round pick.
Now he was a free agent, and Google, Intel, and others courted him.
Tong picked Huawei. He wanted to keep his networking scientists together, and the team didn't want to leave Canada.
The Chinese company was happy to recruit the group and let them stay in place.
Huawei also promised them freedom to attack the signature challenge for networking science in the 21st century:
creating the infrastructure for #5G.
In this iteration of mobile platforms, billions of mobile devices would seamlessly connect to networks. It promised to transform the world in ways even the scientists could not imagine, and it would mean vast fortunes for those who produced the technology.
The race for #patents would be intense, a matter not only of profit but also national pride.
Not long after Tong joined Huawei, in 2009, a research paper came to his attention.
Tong had helped produce the technology that provided the radio-transmission error correction for the current standard, known as turbo codes.
He thought the polar codes concept could be its replacement in 5G.
But the obstacles were considerable, and Tong originally couldn't interest his Canadian researchers in attacking the problem.
Then, in 2012, Huawei asked Tong to restructure its communications lab in China.
He took the opportunity to assign several smart young engineers to work on polar codes.
It involved the none-too-certain process of taking a mathematical theory and making it actually work in practical design, but they made progress and the team grew.
With each innovation, Huawei rushed to the patent office.
In 2013, Wen Tong asked Huawei's investment board for $600 million for 5G research.
“Very simple,” Tong says. “20 minutes, and they decided.”
The answer was yes, and a good deal of that money went into polar codes.
After Huawei came up with software that implemented the theory, the work shifted to testing and iterating. Eventually hundreds of engineers were involved.
Tong was not the only information scientist who had seen Arıkan's paper. #Alexander#Vardy of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego says the paper achieved “something that people were trying to do for 60 years.”
The challenge was that polar codes were not suited for 5G's short blocklengths
—the amount of 0s and 1s strung together.
Vardy and his postdoc, #Ido#Tal of the #Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, modified the error-correcting technology so it outperformed other state-of-the-art codes when applied to 5G's short blocklengths.
Vardy says he presented his findings in a conference in 2011.
“Huawei was there in the audience, and right after that they ran with it,” he says, seemingly without rancor.
(UC San Diego owns Vardy and Tal's patent and has licensed it to Samsung on a nonexclusive basis.)
Today Huawei holds more than two-thirds of the polar code patent “families”
—10 times as many as its nearest competitor.
The general feeling in the field, Vardy said, was that Huawei “invested a lot of research time and effort into developing this idea.”
It seemed “all the other companies were at least a few years behind.”
But all that work and all those patents would be wasted if the technology didn't fit into the 5G platform.
“It has to be adopted by everybody,” Tong says.
“You have to convince the entire industry that this is good for 5G.”
If polar codes were to be the symbol of Huawei's superiority, there was one more hurdle:
“I had the responsibility,” Wen Tong says, “to make it a standard.”
With a team of seasoned and dedicated entertainment attorneys, The Hollywood Lawyer can help you with the full range of legal and business issues that affect the film, television, music, social media, podcasting, licensing, and talent representation industries.
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According to Beauvoir, the independence of awareness is both liberating and difficult to deal with. That person would argue that everyone is born with the ability to provide meaning to their lives. And, no matter how hard we try, our innate drive to discover meaning and make it happen in the world will never be completely satisfied.
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Christopher #Hitchens, the renowned intellectual and prolific writer, was a dominant figure in the world of literature, journalism, and public speaking. With a wit as sharp as a sword, he fearlessly challenged conventional thinking and championed the importance of rational thought in a world often clouded by dogma and irrationality.
#EO, 2022, #DirectedBy#JerzySkolimowski, is a beautiful, moving, and deeply sad #movie that I can't recommend for everyone, but I recommend everyone watch.
I don't watch as many movies as I'd like on #TheCriterionChannel because most of the ones I choose require a level of #intellectual or #emotional investment, or both, that's been difficult for me since 2011, when my marriage imploded. I saw #Melancholia a few weeks later in the theater, which perfectly describes the movie and my mood then.
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As I interact with the world around me, it becomes increasingly evident that there is an alarming lack of depth in today’s #society. People seem to be more interested in superficial interactions and engaging in mindless small talk rather than delving into meaningful conversations. This lack of depth has far-reaching consequences, impacting our personal #relationships, #intellectual growth, and overall.....
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My living room as an antenna test chamber 😂 Well, it was a rainy day, couldn’t set it up outside.
I’m testing a 2.4GHz dish, meant for WiFi links, but as it turns out, it has a decent match at 1420MHz so it’s actually usable as a Hydrogen Line radio telescope antenna.
Traversing in front of it, you can see its impedance (S11 for the experts) change. This happens because I’m affecting its near field. In human understandable terms: being sufficiently close to the antenna affects how it performs.
With my newly acquired LNA, this will likely end up being a much more portable Hydrogen Line radio telescope, I have high expectations 😃
"Some guy who builds his own radio #telescope to satisfy his #intellectual#curiosity" is exactly the type of thing that you can get from the internet that you never would have found at a library in the pre-digital days. It's fantastic!
Los Angeles Business Lawyer | The Hollywood Lawyer (thehollywoodlawyer.com)
With a team of seasoned and dedicated entertainment attorneys, The Hollywood Lawyer can help you with the full range of legal and business issues that affect the film, television, music, social media, podcasting, licensing, and talent representation industries.
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