With 5,300 private networks, China's industrial 5G has achieved serious scale.(Source: Sipa US/Alamy Stock Photo)   China's full-blooded advance into 5G enterprise networking is getting some serious scale. The three state-owned operators have built 5,325 5G private networks with a total of more than 20,000 use cases across 40 economic sectors, a Ministry of Industry and IT official disclosed in May. That is way beyond the rest of the world combined. As with many China 5G stats, we have only sketchy details of the business reality behind the lofty numbers. Looking up But the telcos certainly look to be getting plenty of traction. They don't disclose specific numbers on their enterprise 5G sales, but in their Q1 filings all three reported healthy increases in enterprise services that also include cloud and data center. China Mobile and China Unic...

Addressing the laser integration challenge in silicon photonics. (Source: OpenLight)  OpenLight, a newly launched, independent company formed by investments from Synopsys and Juniper, announced yesterday the world’s first open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers. The California–based company seeks to provide chip manufacturers with a means to create photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that offer the highest performance possible. Applications will include datacom, telecom, and LiDAR markets, to name a few, all while operating at low power. With a recent exponential increase in the use of artificial–intelligence and machine–learning technologies, silicon photonics has seen a recent surge. Chipmakers are now setting their sights on PICs thanks to their innate ability to address the growing bandwidth demands of high–leve...

  Modern China has a penchant for giant projects – high-speed rail, airports, staging multiple Olympics and the world's biggest 5G rollout, to name a few. Now key economic agencies including the Ministry for Industry and IT (MIIT) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) have called for the creation of a national integrated data center and cloud computing grid. Much of the new capacity is to be built in China's remote and under-developed western regions, thereby ticking multiple boxes. One is it will juice the national drive to expand computing power . The other is it will address the imbalance between the wealthy, high-cost eastern provinces and the northern and western regions that offer low costs and abundant clean energy resources. "The western part of China is rich in resources, especially renewable resources, which is full of p...