Malaysian telco U Mobile said on Saturday it has scored separate deals with Chinese telecoms vendors Huawei and ZTE to explore and develop 5G use cases in Malaysia focused on verticals and the agriculture sector.
Under a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with Huawei in Beijing, U Mobile and Huawei will explore and promote adoption and commercialisation of “X2B – 5G” applications, solutions and intelligent services to Malaysian businesses in vertical sectors including manufacturing, retail and agriculture.
To that end, the two companies will test of new technologies such as RedCap, passive-IoT and mmWave to support development of X2B use cases, and will also develop 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) applications to enhance use cases like live broadcast, transportation and “Internet of Video Things” (which combines things like surveillance cameras, traffic cameras, dashcams and environmental monitoring cameras with big data analytics).
U Mobile said it will tap into Huawei’s cloud infrastructure in Malaysia as well as its ecosystem of international and local partners to enhance Malaysia’s X2B landscape.
Meanwhile, a sperate MoU between U Mobile and ZTE will see both companies collaborate to develop 5G-powered intelligent agriculture use cases and applications to enable digital transformation of Malaysia’s agricultural industry.
U Mobile and ZTE plan to leverage technologies such as IoT, RedCap, and cloud platforms to support process automation such as autonomous agricultural machinery and machine vision inspection, which could improve efficiency of agricultural operations and enhance productivity levels.
The MoU also calls for U Mobile and ZTE to work together to speed up deployment and enhancement of connectivity in rural areas in Malaysia using ZTE’s RuralPilot solution which ZTE says is easy to install and uses hybrid power solution involving solar panels and high-performance lithium batteries. For rural areas with no fibre infrastructure, U Mobile and ZTE will explore ways to use CPE-based Smart Relay to extend the backhaul connectivity range for base stations.
U Mobile said the rural connectivity solutions will benefit education, healthcare and tourism in those areas, as well as agriculture.
U Mobile signed the deals with Huawei and ZTE at their respective offices in Beijing in conjunction with a three-day work visit to Beijing by Malaysian Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil, who attended both signings.
During the same trip, Fahmi also witnessed an agreement by Chinese LEO satellite operator Geespace and Malaysian telecoms service provider Altel Communications to establish an R&D centre to develop use cases for direct-to-device (D2D) satellite communications technology in Malaysia.
Fahmi also signed MoUs with China's National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to cooperate in the areas of media and broadcasting, to include exploring ways for Malaysia to leverage AI tech from China in its telecoms, media, broadcasting and film sectors, according to the Bernama news agency.
