Chinese network vendor to educate Aussies

Following last week's announcement that network and telecommunications equipment supplier Huawei would be recruiting 200 new employees in its Melbourne office, ZDNet Australia understands Huawei is in talks to introduce broadband engineering training courses at the University of Melbourne.

Huawei already offers similar training courses in its university-style office campuses in Shanghai and Shenzhen, but there is no similar training campus established at Huawei's offices in Australia.

Although negotiations for this have yet to be finalised with the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society (IBES), the plan will be for trainers from these campuses to be brought out to Australia to school up to 5000 engineers at IBES over the next few years. Huawei became a platinum sponsor of the institute in January this year.

Although Australia's current telecommunications engineering training is on par with the technology available in Australia, there is no training for newer telecommunications offerings from Huawei such as its "4G" Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile broadband networks.

LTE, Huawei's mobile broadband technology that can give users peak uplink speeds of 50Mbps, is currently being trialled in Melbourne by Huawei for Telstra. Huawei is currently trialling the technology in more than 60 locations around the world and LTE has been deployed at the 2010 World Expo at Shanghai where it is being used by hundreds of staff and vendors.

Josh Taylor travelled to Shanghai as a guest of Huawei.