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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

How is it that the west allowed Huawei to gain such a lead in 5G? If this has national security implications, why didn't the US support its domestic telecom firms?

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The US, outside of the military, has a failure to make policy, whereas China has very clear development policies.

Why is that?

The US is led mainly by lawyers, where facts are debatable, whereas most of China's leaders are STEM graduates.

Thus China has constructed around 50 new cities and airports in the past couple of decades, while the US literally can't dig a tunnel from one side of Central Expressway in Mountain View or Palo Alto to the other.

The most egregious failure of US leadership is the corona virus crisis in hospitals. But you could say the same about infrastructure, or just about any other public policy.

We've had a couple of engineers as PMs in my Southern EU country (one of them is now the Secretary General of the UN - he started his career as an assistant professor teaching systems theory and telecommunications signals), and I can assure you it's no panacea. Pouring concrete is easy and not by itself synonymous with good governance.

And since you said "any other public policy", I have to say I'd easily trade 50 tunnels and airports for access to Wikipedia.

Are you talking about the same China that understood the risk of disease so well it allowed wet markets to flourish in the most abject hygiene conditions possible? I suppose they perhaps lack virologists or similar in their 'STEM graduate', technocratic government. Or perhaps they just didn't care. This meme of China being ultra competent needs to die; they have 1.4 billion people, there's enough latent talent there that'll shine through despite the best attempts by the CCP to kill a lot of it.

The US hasn't had domestic telecom infrastructure firms for many years. We rely on Nokia and Ericsson, and both have failed to compete with Huawei.

What about Qualcomm, Motorola, Intel?

When it comes to building the mobile network itself, none of the companies you mention have any footprint in that space. It's really the 3 (Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei) along with some less prominent players (Samsung, ZTE etc). The vast majority of networks are using the big 3.

They're on the handset side. The cellular infrastructure itself comes from Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia.

This is the key question! Both Europe and the USA took their eye off the ball.

Europe's overly strict rules on "state aid" (giving public money to fund private sector work) mean that large, publicly traded telecoms companies are outsourcing their own R&D out to China, simply to save money. Few people realise, but that's where Nokia and Ericsson do a lot of their 5G R&D, and this can be verified with a quick dig around jobs and LinkedIn etc.

Huawei is the recipient of large quantities of state aid domestically, as well as the beneficiary of inter-governnental loans from the Chinese government to other countries for the purpose of building a mobile network!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-journal-calculated-huaw...

In terms of the USA, they don't have a significant notional domestic player in base stations - if we consider significant players as being Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei, and consider the former 2 as being mostly European.

The obvious existing networking business to enter from the US perspective would be Cisco, and they weren't interested in this kind of low margin stuff (which says a lot about their other pricing!)

https://www.ft.com/content/536d28c8-4e87-11ea-95a0-43d18ec71... (soft paywall, access via Google referrer)

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