SHANGHAI — SoftBank of Japan has begun deploying Huawei’s SD-WAN technology and plans to sell it as a managed service to enterprise customers in Japan and across the world.

Kevin Hu, president of Huawei’s switch and enterprise gateway products, said Huawei targets its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to service providers, who in turn will sell the service to their enterprise customers.

Huawei first talked about its SD-WAN service at last year’s Huawei Connect conference. At that time it said Telia was the first service provider to use its technology. Hu said Huawei is working on SD-WAN with other service provider customers in China as well as outside the country, but has yet to name any others aside from SoftBank and Telia. Hu said there might be other customer announcements by the end of the year.

“We sell our solution to the service provider," Hu said. "It’s very easy for them to resell.”

When asked if Huawei has to compete with any other SD-WAN vendors in China, Hu said, “There’s not so much competition in China. In China some customers like our solution.”

Huawei actually got its start as a telecom equipment provider serving Chinese carriers. The company now has three business segments: carrier, consumer, and enterprise. Carrier is still the largest business segment, followed by the consumer segment, which sells millions of cellphones globally.

Like other SD-WAN technologies, Huawei’s solution manages branch office connections, including multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), broadband Internet, DSL, LTE, or WiFi. And at its Huawei Connect show this week, the company announced a 10 Gb/s-capable access point based on the proposed IEEE 802.11ax standard. The current IEEE standard is 802.11ac.

Its new X-Gen WiFi access point provides a three-times improvement in data traffic speed. It also improves capacity by more than four times with the ability to now support 400 users simultaneously.

The X-Gen WiFi access point can also support Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in branch offices. Those sensors might include such things as lighting and motion detectors or heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) controls. It effectively provides a single platform that converges the IoT network with WiFi.

Huawei’s SD-WAN technology uses its AR series routers, and it is managed by its Agile software-defined networking (SDN) controller.

“SD-WAN is focused on the WAN,” said Hu. “But the SDN controller can manage both the WAN and wireless LAN.”

Hu added the company has deployed more than 100 Agile controllers for data centers in China.