Justin Mallen | Handling Data Servers for the Largest Shopping Day in the World, How 5G Will Change the Internet, and Huawei’s Future

In this episode of The Negotiation, we talk with Justin Mallen, Founder, and CEO of Silk Road Telecommunication, a data services company based in Hangzhou. Justin has been in China since the ’90s and founded his company in the year 2000, foreseeing the immediate need for data service centers to play a pivotal role in China’s emerging internet roll-out. We talk about what it means to process immense amounts of data for high-traffic days like 6.18 or 11.11, and how China grew from no internet users to triple that of the US at nearly 900 million today. We talk about the state of China’s mobile internet and which of the big three are dominating and why, including a quick lesson on something called “peering” that is widely used in North America but still not adopted by the Chinese carriers. We also talk about 5G – what it is, what it means for infrastructure, and the future technologies it brings significantly closer to becoming a reality. Lastly, we talk about Huawei and how that company is doing amidst tremendous pushback from the Trump Administration on security concerns on one side, and the impact of COVID-19 on the other that has decelerated the roll-out of 5G, something that most expected to catapult Huawei to the top rungs of the market. Enjoy!