Hobbling Huawei: Inside the U.S. war on China’s tech giant

I think there was substantial skepticism among those nations and those companies that anybody was going to beat them to the punch, specifically that China would present such a credible offering. China went from barely having any tech in 1999, to showing up for the race by 2009, to competing to lead in 5G by 2019. If you asked Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, or the European suppliers, about that in 2005 or 2010, they would have never believed it. Simply put, I think they all believed they could take their time and that the market was theirs (resting on one's laurels). They underestimated China's determination. We'll see if they keep making that mistake.

The US doesn't have large domain players in the telecom space that supply the broad spectrum of equipment that runs what is known as the 4G EPC[1] or 5G Core[2] (data & packet processing) and RAN[3] (radio access network).

Qualcomm and Intel focus and specialize on chips. Cisco focuses on layer 2, layer 3 and partially layer 7 equipment (think: routers & switches). Cisco has some products that compete against Huawei to a certain extent, alongside a wider product suite by Ericsson and Nokia, but all three vendors are more expensive than Huawei.

From the article:

"But the options are limited. Huawei is one of only three major global companies that analysts say can supply a broad range of advanced mobile network equipment at scale. The other two are Ericsson and Nokia. And Huawei has a reputation among telecom operators for supplying cost-effective equipment promptly."

As per the article, Huwaei is flat out cheaper. On top of this, they provide good-enough products (sometimes better, sometimes not) across performance, feature, stability and scale dimensions. The telecom vendor game is often one of references and precedent, especially when dealing with large telecom groups operating in multiple countries (think: Orange Group, Deutsche Telekom Group, Telefonica Group, Vodafone Group, etc.).

[1] https://www.3gpp.org/technologies/keywords-acronyms/100-the-...

[2] https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2018/5/core-network-evoluti...

[3] https://www.3gpp.org/specifications-groups/ran-plenary

This goes back to Carly Fiorina gutting Lucent (Western Electric and Bell Labs) before she gutted HP. Quite a career to set up the decline of two of the most iconic US tech companies.

Qualcomm, Cisco and Intel left the base station business a long time ago or were never in it. Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia all have 5G equipment, some of it semi-widely deployed already. None of the countries he mentioned had any 4G business to speak of either.

And is the Huawei ban also about giving the competition a chance to catch up?

Nokia

Good commentary, well & clearly stated!

In practice, 5G is less about speed and more about massive IoT deployments, which could lead to massive surveillance. It's no surprise that those in the surveillance business are wary of foreign actors.

"Citing unidentified intelligence sources"

An option would be to confidentially share with UK or German intelligence agencies and verify, but they chose instead to publish a vague article. Seems doubtful this will result in anything concrete.

Corporations are people too! So yes, I guess they can be consrcipted

Huawei can still use Android. They just can't install Google apps on their devices, like Amazon.

The 'trade war' has been going on for 30 years, we just didn't care that China was doing certain things until it hit home.

It was arguably beneficial to not worry about China's IP issues, foreign ownership, capital controls etc. in the 1990's because a growing China was good for everyone.

Now it's not, so there's a realignment.

There's cynicism here, but both issues are perfectly credible: trade/technology and security.

There are a ton of externalizations that enable China to provide, especially 'services' so cheaply. Those externalizations matter in trade, and probably should be capture in some form of tariff.

i.e. it's not actually 'cheaper' for Sweden to buy stuff from China, if all things otherwise equal the only difference is the manufacturer in China doesn't have to pay for carbon taxes or something like that. It's just moving deck chairs around.

More like governments are at "war" and all the big corporations caught in the middle of trade are the "weapons".

Every American company is at the beck and call of the US government at all times, with their existence in peril if they disobey. The US government has been regulating trade like this since before we were born, and most of the time we don't even notice. This is not the first time that Silicon Valley had to obey US government regulations. Notice that there are hardly any Iranian or North Korean tech companies doing business around the world- any US company that transfers technology to a hostile country gets shut down and people go to jail, and it's not even controversial.

The only thing that's unique with this case is that it's rare for the US government to be so openly hostile toward a major trade partner.

Those companies have been actively cooperating with US intelligence since forever. No news here really.

I think it's partly that, and partly just that having other countries rely on you for their infrastructure gives you more political leverage. US wants to deny political leverage to China and take it for itself.

> US leads the world in illegal activities and spying/stealing from foreign nations.

That's one of those empty, non-falsifiable statements that don't do anything to further a discussion. Spying and illegal activities are by definition supposed to be secret.

But it also doesn't matter. Because...

> Hypocrisy and arrogance at its finest

... as a matter of general principle: it's in the best interest of a country to know what other countries are doing and to protect its own assets. There is no contradiction in doing both at the same time.

If a country suspects that one of the cornerstones of its communication infrastructure is at risk of being infiltrated by a foreign power, it makes sense to take steps to avoid that.

I'll leave it to others to judge whether or not that principle applies to the Huawei case.

It's not hypocrisy or arrogance in any regard.

The US does not view China as an ally, it's a competitor that the US sometimes cooperates with economically.

The US and its allies are saying they prefer to keep the spying inside their own allied domain. That's not only entirely rational, it obviously makes perfect sense from a national self-interest standpoint.

As an American, if I get to choose, I'm buying my 5G tech from European or Asian allies. I'll happily pay more for it.

The US isn't saying China can't spy, it's universally understood that China is spying and will keep trying to, just as the US will. The US is basically openly saying it's going to attempt to counter or limit that spying, because China is a global rival in all regards. Just as China will always attempt to limit the ability of the US to spy on China and its interests. The same goes for Russia and its spying, going all the way back to the early days of the USSR.

Huawei is not known as an open company, if anything they're the very opposite. They stopped providing unlock ability for their mobile devices some time back, and even before that they were known for having by far the hardest system to work with for phone "modders" - bricked hardware was exceedingly common, and zero outside support was provided. That's incredibly harsh even by CN standards.

Looks like China is getting a taste of its own protectionist measures.

Doesn't seem more dangerous due to the tech but due to the fact that no one from Western countries has actually built hardware that we can buy.

Many reasons, you name it:

- Almost any existent device will likely be connected to the Internet through 5G almost as fast as it became available

- Access probably will be a LOT cheaper than 4G, will get there a lot faster (months not years), so everybody will be onboard ASAP

- 5G network could easily replace many fiber optic deployments currently used by telecommunication companies big clients (so if you breach the 5G infrastructure, you're reaching internal networks in banks, trust funds, government sensitive information offices, whatever fancy dangerous stuff not suitable for public access)

- 5G is REALLY FAST and RELIABLE, (very hight bandwith plus very, very low latency), so if you hack into something, or if you deploy malware, it will spread faster than the Thanos snap. The data exfiltration - taking your stolen data out to your infrastructure - could take a LOT less than now, this probably means the bad guys could hack out a lot more data than now, also probably using a "raw" approach: if you get in, just transfer everything you can access, right now

- The massive (freaking massive) traffic you're going to see into the network monitoring infrastructure will probably be very similar to what Five Eyes currently sees for entire countries, but in city per city base (NY, Boston, DC, Berlin, Barcelona, etc.), so initially very few players will be able to get out something meaningful from the monitoring stuff, but what devices failed: more bad guys oportunities.

Finally.

- Whoever makes the hardware has the upper hand, you - whoever you are - go behind them, in almost any security scenario.

So yeah, we need to have this stuff under some serious control.

Trump is almost certainly right in his attemp to make what he's doing.

It's not more dangerous, it's that the existing infrastructure is not (as) compromised as new infrastructure to be built with Huawei goods.

It should be self evident that turning over domestic communications infrastructure to a global rival with the largest military on the planet, nuclear first strike capability, a history of violence, newly minted dictator, and global ambitions is a terrible idea.

Also, the US government isn't stealing US IP and giving it to Chinese businesses. The PLA is, and their ties to Huawei run deep.

Haha! “Nobody can spy unless it’s us.” Touché! (Best uttered while spying on the world through a prism.)

? not sure what you mean is it the use of "kit"?

Piece of kit is a british idiom, yes if that's what you mean.

kit = gear

Got creditable source?

Didn't know there was a class action. Mine used to die randomly all the time until I replaced the battery. I'm contemplating getting a new phone because a good portion of the time it's still slow AF