From The Maritime Executive, November 7:
How the Digital Silk Road is Digitizing Shipping with China as the Sole Network Administrator.
At the heart of US dominance as an information empire back in 20th century was the AT&T Company. For decades, AT&T deployed its expertise to solve some of the most complex and sensitive telecommunications puzzles of the era. This included helping to develop nuclear weapons technology, a ballistic missile warning system and a secret communications network for Air Force One.
In the 1930s, AT&T was also responsible for ship to shore radiotelephone system, which consisted of high seas service stations dotting the Pacific and the Atlantic Coasts, operating under the WOO call-sign. In those days before the satellite technology became widely available, mariners could only communicate using telephone calls placed by contacting an AT&T marine operator on VHF (Very High Frequency) channels.
The contours of shipping’s telecommunication technology have changed from the historical era of AT&T dominance and are shifting to a future one, which seems imprinted in China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR).
DSR is the largest deployment of transnational digital infrastructure ever witnessed. Its backbone is thousands of miles of subsea fiber optic cables beneath the world’s oceans. The nerve center is China’s “Big Three” state owned telecommunications firms - China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile. They assist in carrying, storing and mining of data passing through the subsea cables encircling the earth, while at the same time keeping China’s networks out of foreigners’ reach.
Essentially, these firms are doing the final leg of China’s global physical footprint through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For every visible Chinese investment in transport infrastructure, there is an invisible attempt to streamline its digital dimension.
Take the case of the Chinese-controlled Piraeus port in Greece. The benefit of the investment is not just in expanding the port’s physical capacity, but its network systems have also been overhauled courtesy of Huawei. This is in addition to installing routers, which are now supplying free Wi-Fi to the port’s staff and tourists at the cruise terminal. As Jonathan Hillman says in a new book, The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future, “China has been packaging digital infrastructure with the traditional infrastructure, and the world desperately needs both.”
In September, Huawei launched its Smart Port solution during the Huawei CONNECT 2021 forum. It is targeting the countries building world-class ports, and it wants to deploy the technology in making cargo handling more intelligent and convenient. The application focuses on four areas: intelligent customs clearance, visualized collaborative command, convenient clearance systems and comprehensive port campus management. According to a company statement on the Smart Port application, the use of Big Data, AI and cloud computing technology gives the application a unique proposition for operations in busy ports.
With this, it is now a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ the technology will readily find its way to Chinese-backed ports, from Lamu in Kenya to Sines in Portugal....
....MUCH MORE
As noted a few weeks ago: "I'll get around to China's offer to run the WHO's global QR code vaccine passport program sometime next year."
