T-Mobile, Sprint see Huawei shun clinching U.S. deal | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile, Sprint see Huawei shun clinching U.S. deal

reuters.com

42 pointstareqak21 comments

That's a pretty incomprehensible headline.

The implied conditionality here is troubling me. Reasons to block a merger should be about market power. This is like pork barrelling, to secure a tactical moment in a trade war.

> The implied conditionality here is troubling me. Reasons to block a merger should be about market power.

Why just market power? National security seems like it's also be a valid, defensible reason to kill a deal (it'd have been obvious to block Russian company taking control of a major US defense contractor, especially during the Cold War).

You can't join together, even though neither of you have Huawei deployed, because your German majority owner has Huawei and we want to leverage an advantage. Merkel isn't in five eyes and we have no other leverage.

That's abusing the reasons major mergers like this are referred to the system in peacetime. It's not a hot war, it's not a cold ear, it's a trade war. What happened to the WTO? Did we all just walk off the reservation back to tarrifland?

> and we want to leverage an advantage

The T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom networks are heavily integrated. It would be disingenuous to say you can use vulnerable gear as long as it is outside US borders.

China has developing nation status at the WTO. Thus China has an unfair advantage under WTO rules (in the direct sense - they literally get special treatment).

Until that is rectified expect the WTO to not hold much sway over US trade policy.

National security is becoming an umbrella term to justify anything, including tariff on Canadian steel.

I dont think either Sprint or T-Mobile have any Huawei gear in their network anymore, Sprint got rid of theirs when they migrated from WiMAX to LTE.

"Like all major U.S. wireless carriers, T-Mobile and Sprint do not use Huawei equipment, but their majority owners, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG and Japan’s SoftBank Group Ltd, respectively, use some Huawei gear in overseas markets."

"U.S. government officials had been pressuring Deutsche Telekom to stop using Huawei equipment."

Both Sprint and T-Mobile had a significant Huawei footprints, Sprint via Clearwire, and T-Mobile via MetroPCS - AT&T also bought some when they bought Cricket too. It's all gone now. Sprint is a mix of Samsung, Alcatel-Lucent (Now Nokia), and Ericsson, depending on the market - T-Mobile is all Ericsson I think.

I don't think anyone's disputing that they've removed their Huawei gear from their US networks, but it appears they may still have some installed in other countries, e.g. Germany or Japan.

As a German, I have to ask why should that be any of the US's business?

It's disturbing how nonchalantly this keeps happening [0] and escalating with barely anybody daring to even mention the actual reasons behind it and instead playing up the "moral" angle of "China possibly spying = evil, US most certainly spying = good [1]".

While the US can't even reign in its own surveillance apparatus on a domestic level [2]. In that context, the US is like the thief yelling "Hold the thief!" to distract from its own, still on-going, much bigger heist.

A reminder: The US uses its "intelligence dominance" to not only abduct people all over the world, but de-facto assassinate them, "we kill people based on metadata" is not just a meme [3]. At least China keeps most of that stuff on a domestic level, while if you end up in the US's crosshairs you will be quite literally hunted all over the globe.

One has to wonder if Huawei systems encryption really is that much better, and that's why the US intelligence community is so "concerned" about an increased adoption of Huawei systems: They fear to lose their massive reach and access.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-22/why-ameri...

[1] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/worlds-largest-inter...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/nsa-surveilla...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

> As a German, I have to ask why should that be any of the US's business?

Because those networks might be integrated internally and any vulnerabilities or backdoors in equipment installed in other countries might offer a jumping off point to access US parts of the network.

If that'd be the case then Germany should have just as much of a right to meddle with US internal issues, because any integration like that would always work both ways. Fat chance of that ever happening.

> If that'd be the case then Germany should have just as much of a right to meddle with US internal issues, because any integration like that would always work both ways. Fat chance of that ever happening.

Doesn't it already? I'm pretty sure EU antitrust authorities have fined and prevented mergers of US companies, for instance.

> "why should that be any of the US's business?"

I think one justification is that the U.S. shares sensitive intelligence information with Germany, and a compromised German network might jeopardize the information.

just in case anyone ever thought blocking huawei is about national security in the US. this looks like the americans are looking around trying to cut huawei out of deals in any country.

Make no mistake, Huawei is in fact a security nightmare, and that is true regardless of whether or not corporations (with no government ownership, and are both in fact foreign owned) are going to be opportunistic about it.

>"Make no mistake, Huawei is in fact a security nightmare,"

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean a potential nightmare? Has there been any actual evidence of backdoors?

You won't get an answer because there hasn't been any evidence at all. People aligned with the US on their trade war tend to just insinuate.

Backdoors are a moot point. Security is so bad on them that they don’t need a backdoor. Or maybe that is the backdoor. I don’t know if it’s incompetence or plausible deniability. I don’t care to speculate, and am not interested in the politics, all I am saying is, technically speaking, you do not want this shit near your communications.

Some well known industry experts sharing their opinions: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2505191/malware-vulner...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com