Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd (華為) is offering to install — for free — a mobile-phone network worth ￡50 million (US$81.2 million) on the London Underground train system in time for the next year’s Olympics, a report said yesterday.
Huawei is presenting the offer as a gift from one Olympic host nation to another, the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper reported, without citing its sources.
The company would -reportedly install mobile transmitters along the ceilings of tunnels so that travelers could make and receive calls for the first time while underground.
Mobile operators, including Vodafone Group PLC and Telefonica O2 UK, have agreed to pay for the installation work, while Huawei hopes to earn income in maintenance fees, according to the report.
Transport for London, the official body responsible for the transport system in the city, said talks had started on fitting a mobile network on the underground, but did not confirm Huawei’s involvement.
“Transport for London and the Mayor of London [Boris Johnson] are currently in discussion with mobile phone operators and other suppliers about the potential provision of mobile phone services on the deep Tube network,” a spokesman said.
However, Member of Parliament Patrick Mercer, of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party, said allowing a Chinese firm to provide the -network could pose a security risk.
“It has been proven that a proportion of the cyberattacks on this country come from China,” he told the Sunday Times. “I wonder when the eyes of the world are upon us whether there is sense in using a Chinese firm to install a sensitive mobile network.”
Huawei, founded 23 years ago by Ren Zhengfei (任正非), a former People’s Liberation Army engineer, has long rejected accusations that it has ties to the Chinese military.
It insists it is owned by its employees and that Ren, its chief executive, has less than a 2 percent stake in the company.
Huawei’s technology is used to build mobile phone networks around the world and its consumer products include smartphones that run on Google Inc’s Android platform and technology to connect laptops to the Internet using 3G networks.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
RSS