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> US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for technical reasons. Telecom infrastructure is strategic industry and US want's to prevent Chinese getting ahead.

Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway, it would be Finland and Sweden who do.

Supply chain trust has always been a primary concern of any kind of critical resource/infrastructure defensive strategy. Every time a country relies on another for a critical ongoing need, it introduces an inherent power imbalance that the supplying country can use as a leverage. This kind of stuff is centuries-old geopolitical strategy, and it's still in the news every day when we're talking about energy, food, minerals, etc. (e.g. Russian pipelines) Why is communications infrastructure any different? It's not.

Do you mean NOKIA and Ericsson?

Yes, those are the only cellular infrastructure companies besides Huawei. There was Alcatel-Lucent, but Nokia bought them a while back.

There's an emerging trend of service providers trying to virtualize their core network. Rakuten in Japan is a leading example.

"They have assembled a small army of suppliers to build a virtualized network built on x86 hardware. ... Rakuten has no dedicated hardware except in its antennas, ensuring the upgrade to 5G will be straightforward. ... Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin said the network has "virtualized everything," including radio access, core, transport, IP, billing and operational support systems."

I'm not sure who this army of suppliers is though.

> Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway

Why are you limiting US strategic interests to protectionism of private companies? It is in the American Interest (both private and public spheres) if "Made in China 2025" were to fail: Huawei is a just one front in that war. In this light, minimizing Huawei's market access with (even in the absence of domestic competitors) makes strategic sense: less experience in the market, less revenue, less R&D). Technological expertise tends to bleed into military applications

All the “American” products are made in China, too, so I don’t see what the difference is.

The supply chain for one of these products consists of more than hardware manufacturing. You’ve got software, support, maintenance, governance, etc.

The hardware is the easier part to account for, it’s both physical and a constant.

OP said it’s strategic, not that it’s protectionist for US companies (in fact, they pointed out that no US companies are competing in the next sentence that you didn’t quote). I think you’re both saying essentially the same thing.

There are European vendors like ericcson. This is about being cheap.

This is a strange case where for some reason the EU isn't doing exactly what it very obviously should be doing: looking after its own self-interest and pushing European technology aggressively [1]. The EU should have taken the opportunity to severely deflate Huawei in the EU and push European alternatives.

Europe needs to gain in tech and this is one easy way to do it, by supporting their own players, their own ecosystem. And it's a self-interest freebie at that: the US and EU interests are mostly aligned, there will be no push-back for supporting Ericsson & Co. The US would rather everyone use Ericcson than Huawei.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-e...

In many ways the EU plays by the rulebook of free trade : not discriminating between economic agents based on provenance, but on norms instead.

I don't know about that in this case. There EU members are supposed to have free tradr which means EU goods should have priority due to tax,tariffs and other issues I thought?

That's a short-sighted view of the EU's self-interest. If EU countries ban Huawei from their markets, then China bans EU car companies from its market.

So, is it worth it to sacrifice VW and BMW in order to help Nokia and Ericsson?

Cars are not national communication infrastructure. I am sure China will prefer Huawei for their own mobile gear over nokia and ericcson as well.

> Cars are not national communication infrastructure.

Sure, but are you saying the tradeoff is worth it? It's fairly simple: if Europe begins taking protectionist measures that harm Chinese companies, then China will respond in kind.

I agree. This thread discusses that with a historical perspective: https://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1221842546881679360?s...

It's not just about privacy and security. It's about not entangling your communications infrastructure with a Chinese company that - like all Chinese companies - is completely beholden to and embedded in the framework of CCP governance.

Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.

We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.

There is no vendor lock in in mobile network infrastructure. Everything is standardized trough and trough. You can buy components from different suppliers and they work together.

>Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.

Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.

I don’t think anyone is saying they can’t purchase from someone other than Huawei. They’re saying that they aren’t purchasing from someone other than Huawei (at least for some proportion of the network which is, obviously, manufactured by Huawei).

Vendor lock-in is not the issue. If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware (which is obviously insanely optimistic), that’s a problem. Wars have been won and lost with much less than 6 months of technological/infrastructural head start.

> If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware

Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.

No matter how powerful a nation-state is, it would still be infinitely easier for them to exploit a known CVE by sanctioning a patch than it would be to find a zero day chain that works.

Also, it would afford them the additional political benefit of deniability in their attack.

The nationality of the worker-bees is completely irrelevant when they don't show up because of sanctions or a shift in corporate policies.

>>There is no vendor lock in in mobile network infrastructure. Everything is standardized trough and trough. You can buy components from different suppliers and they work together.

There technically isn't, but 3GPP standardized interfaces leave enough room for there to be a smoother deployment and operational efficiencies gained from a single vendor deploying RAN and Core together. Few suppliers can do this -- Huawei is one of them.

>>Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.

Maybe this is region specific, but I believe most (all?) initial Huawei deployments are performed by Chinese nationals working directly for Huawei. To your point, maintenance (i.e. post-deployment, live production) can be a mix of foreign company employees and Chinese nationals.

What about banning them for philosophical principles? Why would I buy anything from someone who denies Enlightenment principles and views human rights as “Western rights”?

On a long enough timeline, authoritarianism always wins.

You might not like China's internal policy but US foreign policy is not nice too.

Related- a friend of mine was joking (and it will offend supporters of both major political parties)- the democrats want to align with Pakistan and Iran, two biggest sponsors of terror after American military.

Where does that leave SA?

Plus there is likely a fair number of chinese nationals employed by all their competitors. All it takes is one line of code.

>>Interfaces are standardized and you can buy different components from different vendors.

You can buy components from different vendors, except that the overhead of working with thousands of different suppliers for your network is a non-starter, hence network operators around the world have moved to a model where they prefer large domain players to provide packages (e.g. 5G Access, 5G Core, 4G RAN, 4G EPC, etc.) to streamline purchasing, coordination, responsiveness and costs.

>>Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others.

Such extra components can be bought from others, except it should be noted that Huawei seems to provide very attractive prices for their "good enough" offerings in these other categories.

> There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security.

One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.

No association however to the identity of the phone owner.

Phone billing records seem a lot jucier for that.

How hard do you think it is, really, to get somebody's IMEI?

I don't even know the level I should answer.

To cut it short. No, those databases are not stored in base stations, not even close. They are part of core network.

In LTE your handset talks to base transceiver station who talks to eNB who talks to MME who talks to HSS where the data is physically located. MME (Mobility Management Entity) is already part of the evolved Core Huawei has no access to that. Even MME keeps data just temporarily. This all happens in control plane.

If Huawei supplies transceiver stations or eNB's it's nowhere near the point where it could store and distribute user information or track them and not be noticed immediately.

It is not about where your metrics are conventionally stored. Your base station is measuring your gain, all the time; if all your base stations are Huawei, then you can be located quite reliably, then add the other signals the network gives the base station for QoS, this does not seem all that difficult. There is no reason that information can't be gathered through a different channel and analyzed.

I don't know why y'all are lacking imagination all of a sudden on this one matter, but I hope you come around.

It would be prudent to push secure protocols that didn't require these things. eg scrap the IMSI, rotating ephemeral IMEI, network-independent VOIP, and blinded bearer tokens for payment.

But governments intrinsically see surveillance as an unquestioned good and likely wouldn't even approve such protocols for overt telecom use, never mind helping to develop them. The public has already been pwnt by design - this whole topic is just squabbling over who gets the proceeds.