Another Reason U.S. Fears Huawei: Its Gear Works and It's Cheap

I don't know enough to have an opinion on either side of this article, but is it journalistically ok to make your primary source for one side James Clapper without noting his history of lying to Congress and the American people under oath?

(Though, as-expected, he won't be prosecuted https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180313/15105739419/clock...)

It's cheap because they save on R&D via utilizing the Chinese military to hack into competitors and steal their R&D[0][1]. This reduces overhead costs to creating new technology. It also gives the Chinese military an advantage, as they can now tell Huawei to put backdoors into all of their gear.

[0]https://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/how-chinese-hack...

[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-ag...

This has to be BS. Ericsson's gear works, Nokia's gear works.

Both of those are in use, in prod in Canada right now (for Rogers) as far as I know.

And as for it being "cheap" - let's be real - There's a reason why it's cheap - It's state sponsored.

This entire article is probably sponsored by China.

EDIT: I'm extra salty because of the fall of Nortel - which can easily be attributed to Huawei.

There's very little competition because Huawei spent the 1990's and 2000's stealing IP and driving competitors out of the Wireless business. In the 3G competitions there were over a doze vendors of equipment, today there are 3 of any real size. With rest either dead, merged because they couldn't compete with the theft of their IP or just not stepping into game.

When Huawei got caught the Chinese government would "delay" certification in china of the companies suing them for infringement. This would ultimately end with an "understanding" that "no infringement" took place and that it was a misunderstanding. Problem is that misunderstanding always included Huawei and always western telecom vendors. Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, Seimens all sued Huawei at some point - and all settled. Nortel's old headquarters was so riddled with bugs that IP Thieves left in their network the Canadian Department of Defense when they took over the building ultimately delayed moving in because of what they found:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-for...

Huawei has spent the past half dozen years trying to clean up their brand by building consumer products, massive advertising sponsorships, free and paid for "next generation trials" and colocating research centres in the cities and countries where they drove the local competitors into the ground. They're now the only partner local research institutions can turn to for funding. They think they're like Cisco..

The Chinese governments IP transfer rules for international companies wishing to do local sales provide their industries a chance to Learn, coerce, steal and ultimately live within a protected market for these ill gotten gains. Is China buying Western competitors Mobile network infrastructure? Hells no. Why they're shocked that other governments are reacting in protectionist stance and ultimately questioning the interaction between the company and the government should become no surprise.

I am sceptical that Huawei is planting Trojans in its gear. Having a Chinese company corner the world market is probably much more valuable to the Chinese government than possible spying opportunities.

The battlefields in the current world are, I think, more economic battles.

I have some experience with Huawei "enterprise" products and they're awfully cheesy - the hardware is very low rent and the software both limited and very specific to a few common use cases. The configuration experience often needs to be seen to be believed, with support beyond the trivial requiring Huawei engineers flown out. Their products can be crazy cheap, though, and in Asia, easy financing via China state banks is usually enough to close a deal.

"the U.S. has dispatched lawyers, diplomats and intelligence officials to corporate and government offices around the world to press its case that Huawei must not be allowed to run their 5G networks"

and

"U.S. officials, mindful of Huawei’s market advantages, are even trying to develop packages of U.S.-made gear to provide foreign companies an alternative to buying Huawei"

I think this is the crux of it. If Huawei was a security problem, the US would just worry about itself. But Huawei is actually an economic threat to them, which is why we've seen this anti-Huawei sentiment recently.

Another aspect is that with the equipment where we worked for a competing product, Huawei was cheap because it cheated in electromagnetic compatibility requirements, while our products were strictly required to comply. I suppose the reason for more lax approach by customers to Huawei was simply the desire to bring it up as a new competitor and cut prices.

Sure, the things worked well enough. They maybe caused interference in some other equipment, maybe not, but in any case it was not too bad, because the EMC requirements were quite tight for these products.

(This was 15 years ago and I have no specific references, I just remember the frustration of our HW designers.)

Tech monkeys here did even realize that it is about the trade war. National security is decades ago is the reason why Chinese gov banned tech giant unless they have completely complied with Chinese laws. Now it's your turn America

Has there been a thorough, independent and transparent audit of Huawei components ?

How would a layman even start making up their mind about this ?

This is not universally true of all of Huawei's products relative to competition in terms of cost. Huawei's enterprise storage products, for instance, are significantly more expensive than alternatives from companies in the West.

Not a Chinese agent. But if anyone wants to actually be secure they need to ban American equipment as well, which is well suited for only America... and invest in making their own probably open source designs.

What many people here don't remember is that China is only a fairly recent first-class member of the international trading community and that was hugely controversial at the time.

Up until the Clinton administration there was a status of Most Favored Nation that countries had to get. There was a lot of pressure from companies eager to sell to China's 1B+ people and there was a lot of politicking about this. I believe it was a big reason why "most favored nation" was renamed to "permanent normal trade relations" in 1998.

Tiananmen Square was still fresh in peoples minds having only happened less than a decade earlier. China at the time also sold military technology to countries the US wasn't on good terms with.

So China obtained MFN/PNTR in 2000 and joined the WTO the year after. One argument used for this was that the only way to make China play by the rules is to be a member.

What's become increasingly clear however is that China did not, does not and probably will not play by the rules. The examples that spring to mind are:

- Wholesale intellectual property theft from Western companies. To be fair, many Western companies are complicit in this. Eager to open up new markets they agree to "partnerships" with Chinese companies that are thinly veiled IP heists.

- Theft of military secrets and technology.

- Sale of products to sanctioned nations (eg ZTE).

- A concerted effort to ensure that no foreign company ends up owning a market in China. Take all the tech companies in the rest of the world and there's a Chinese equivalent (Google -> Baidu, Amazon -> Alibaba, Apple -> Huawei/ZTE/etc). This isn't an accident and it's not because foreign companies don't "get" the Chinese market.

- The Chinese government and military have a large-scale and active electronic warfare program designed to steal IP, threaten companies and control discourse (eg anyone critical of the Chinese government).

The big concern about this is that isn't rogue actors. This is state sanctioned to the highest levels. The rest of the world seems completely disinclined to tackle this.

But at some point in the future you'll expect to see things like:

- Companies won't do business in China

- Companies won't do business with Chinese companies

- Companies won't employ Chinese citizens (for fear of IP theft).

On the last point, I'm honestly surprised the US government hasn't restricted Chinese-born people from working with any classified tech given the history of theft here.

As to Huawei, this is a real propaganda piece by Bloomberg as anyone who is concerned about the security of their IP and their infrastructure should as part of their due diligence be assessing the risk of using networking gear from a company where there is a serious concern that the Chinese government or military may have compromised the code that hardware runs.

The cheapest bug in the world is still a bug.