Huawei has not formally announced the acquisition, but mentioned it at a London briefing by Leroy Blimegger, its global president of assurance and managed services. He was speaking to press and analysts ahead of a formal announcement at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Fastwire, based in Sydney and Singapore, was founded in 1988 by Jon Birch and Rod Fisher. It has 150 people in offices across Australia, Asia and Europe. In 2007 it acquired S2Net, founded by well know Australian telco entrepreneur René Frei. S2Net was owned by Macquarie Bank, which became a major shareholder in Fastwire.
Fastwire customers include telcos Telstra, Singtel and Optus, Vodafone Hutchinson Australia, Telecom NZ, BT, China Unicom, Telkomsel, Uecomm and Orange. The terms of Huawei’s acquisition of the privately owned Fastwire were not disclosed.
Blimegger said at the briefing that, with the acquisition of Fastwire, Huawei will start selling OSS systems directly to its telco customers. Huawei has offered OSS in the past, but only as part of its wider telco network planning and design and managed services deals. This has included IP maintenance, resource management, provisioning and activation, network diagnosis and monitoring, system architecture and professional services.