Hacker News Reader

Comment by likeabbas | Hacker News Reader

Couldn’t one argue that their strength in cost efficiency was largely built on the theft of IP? Without the IP barriers western countries abide by, they were able to take the best technology from multiple companies, implement it and sell it at a fraction of the price?

View on HN

Not in the realm of 5G network equipment. As BT's McRae says, they are way ahead of their competitors, not something you can achieve by simply copying others' technology:

https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/bts-mcrae-huawei-is-t...

The reality is that Huawei has been outspending its competitors in R&D by a wide margin for over two decades, because the latter are managed by bean counters in thrall to the stock market's short-term horizon. Eventually, the difference would show.

One further wrinkle is that Chinese 5G uses frequencies like 3-4 GHz that are hogged by the military in the US. US carriers have to resort to millimeter wave frequencies in the 30+ GHz range that can't penetrate a door, let alone a building, and are thus mostly useless for 5G penetration outside a very few congested open-air locations, and thus their 5G technology is at a severe disadvantage over the Chinese one:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/standards/how-am...

Most countries not aligned with China or the West will prefer the Huawei technology: superior technology yet cheaper, and far less expensive to deploy and operate. Any country that doesn't puts itself at a competitive disadvantage over others that do. The US may yet convince its European allies to shun Huawei, but it will come at a severe cost.

If the Huawei tech operates on the same frequencies as US military tech, that is reason enough to see the embargo. It is one reason why LEO satellite internet has taken so long, because the plans typically get near some of the frequencies that old maritime GPS devices use and they can't be interrupted.

Just because their 5g tech is the best in no way prices they didn't steal ip to get where they are.

I am not expert on networking equipment by any means. But I would assume that 5g equipment is built upon previous technology.

It would thus follow that stealing the preceding, underlying technology and then focusing resources on building out the 5g part of the tech would be the fastest/cheapest way to become a leader in 5g.

Is it public knowledge yet who Nokia used to fab their chip? I can tell you that's part of the reason they are late to market. They'll get there and it's not like BT isn't already trialling their prototype gear. Some of these customer statements sound like negotiating tactics.

5G is far more about software than RF chips.

If you don't have a next gen chipset you don't have a product to sell to the likes of BT. They are looking for a complete solution and for their investment to last years. That means you need both.

>The reality is that Huawei has been outspending its competitors in R&D by a wide margin for over two decades, because the latter are managed by bean counters in thrall to the stock market's short-term horizon.

The idea that "the stock market" prevents companies from doing any long-term development is one of the most delusional, easy to disprove memes going. Public companies in America have been churning out game-changing technology forever. The Chinese are ahead on 5G, so suddenly the system is a failure?

Going public is a capital raising mechanism, nothing more. And it's probably driven a few orders of magnitude more innovation than it's hindered. The disdain for public markets (or finance in general) on these boards is bizarre.

The failure is that we let Huawei out-invest us (as in Western telecoms network equipment firms, Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel, Lucent, Nortel, Siemens) 2 to 1 in R&D for the last 20 years. That's because Ren Zhengfei is a visionary who was prescient enough to understand the value of R&D in gaining an edge while also ruthless enough to use industrial espionage in the short term to catch up.

The current situation was completely predictable, but industrial policy has a bad name in rentier capitalist circles that dominate our policy apparatus.

>>Couldn’t one argue that their strength in cost efficiency was largely built on the theft of IP?

There are plenty of accusations that this was the case -- I'm not going to comment on the veracity of those accusations. However, if it were true, then that would certainly be a huge factor why Huawei was able to catch up and overtake other domain players within a relatively short period of time.

In defense of Huawei, I would like to point out that Bunnie Huang[1] noticed a certain type of generically Chinese innovation leading him to coin the term "Gongkai"[2][3], the effects of which led to him cataloguing and writing a book[4]. I think the combination of this laissez-faire "flexibility" around WTO-mandated IP rights and a grueling and debilitating 996[5] work ethic helped Huawei, among other Chinese companies, to catch up with Western firms pretty quickly.

[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107

[3] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

[4] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4605

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

> I think the combination of this laissez-faire "flexibility" around WTO-mandated IP rights and a grueling and debilitating 996[5] work ethic helped Huawei, among other Chinese companies, to catch up with Western firms pretty quickly.

This is essentially copied from the Japanese. Japanese mega-corps far as I understand very often unofficially pooled patents and technology. That became an issue as dominance was asserted in the consumer electronics market as outsiders weren't in the club. Entry into an established market meant going up against a thicket of patents owned by multiple entities.

While we don't have any real evidence (from the sources that I read) that Huawei stole 5G tech, it's plausible. They've stolen tech in other areas and then iterated the design so fast that they beat the competition to market.

We know for (nearly) certain that Huawei stole folding screen tech from Samsung (via a supplier), and now that Samsung has reneged on it's Galaxy Fold launch the Huawei folding phone will be first to market.

Now that they have a reputation for stealing it is hard to view their other advancements as purely the result of honest work.

One could also argue that IP hampers innovation and that this is a self-inflicted wound.

Huawei doesn't share its IP with others, and is a very different beast to the gongkai entrepreneurs profiled by Andrew Huang.

Sure one could argue that, but to do that convincingly it would probably best to bring concrete evidence of what IP was supposedly stolen to facilitate the Huawei tech.

Huawei's theft of Cisco's IP is common knowledge, and well documented.

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...

yeah, STRCMP.

And I wouldn't call it "documented", unless it provides references to the official reports. The link points to a Cisco site, and what would you expect Cisco to say?

here's a legacy archive of the relevant articles from a Chinese third-party site: http://tech.sina.com.cn/focus/cisco_huawei/

I'm a bit surprised it is still kept intact after some 20 years. You could see trails of history -- mind the "Google it" header at the top.

Ever used one of those Huawei routers? If you had, I think you'd be in little doubt about the extensive copying of IOS. Also the documentation, CLI... the entire business model was being a cheaper Cisco clone.

You can pull down tons of news reports and even the court filings if you are motivated, but why? Huawei themselves publicly admitted to stealing Cisco's code, the only disagreement was about the scope. I suppose we should just accept at face value their claims, when caught, that it was just a little bit, and only by accident.

Cisco is the only source for any part of the actual expert opinion. Huawei naturally declined Cisco's invitation to permit publishing the entire report; one can imagine how unfavorable it would be.

Those published excerpts are smoking guns - concrete demonstration of wholesale cutting&pasting of Cisco source code, down to whitespace and comments, outside the scope of what Huawei was willing to admit to.

By that time, though, Huawei had already achieved commercial success, and could afford to start cutting fewer corners & better comply with international law. So their plan worked pretty well.

Huawei is right up there with semiconductor mfg as a poster child for government-condoned (even government-assisted) industrial espionage as a tool to bootstrap strategic industries.

I'm not convinced that Huawei will backdoor their 5G gear, but I'm definitely on board with the plan to bar them from US commerce. Why play fair with opponents who cheat?

I don’t have much experience with consumer grade Cisco routers so there’s not much I can comment on this.

I do use a Huawei fiber modem+router 2-in-1 day to day. The router firmware is crap and I have to do some modifications, and effectively disable the router part. The UX is more aligned with the other cheapos in the Chinese market, I think. It’s unlikely Cisco would ship something like that.

I’m not sure if I’d be convinced by what Cisco says, though. The author was direcltly involved in the case two decades ago btw.

Huawei admitted the usage of Cisco code, and promised to remove that part. Case closed. However the article is referring to other parts (strcmp and the like). We have limited neutral information, and in this case, I think, should remain in doubt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com