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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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...

> "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.

> 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.

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