German draft proposal would subsidize smaller firms to enter 5G market
politico.eu
politico.eu
Nokia Networks recently announced Open RAN allegiance/support.
I guess this is about forcing Ericsson to do the same for some added competition. If they don't, who cares, lots of money will still flow back into the german economy.
> The German draft proposal includes over €300 million of investment in Open RAN technology,
This is sort of a (possibly) legal way for the german government to subsidize the company formerly known as Nokia Siemens Networks.
As a Swede: I've long thought that EU will split up in northern/southern parts. Germany is in the middle - this is a stab in the back of Sweden. Before this I thought Germany might end up in the northern part. Now they have forged an alliance with Finland/Nokia.
Ericsson will still be at the forefront of EU infrastructure, they have the money to do it and will earn from that, their reputation too is already favoured in the EU over Huwawei.. Which is the whole point.
But sure.. Swexit, lets 'extrapolate' that out then, Ericsson will then be under increased tarrifs and excluded from initial EU contract proposals.
They have not forged an alliance with anyone, they are leveling the market to allow for other competitors and not have a bottleneck on suppliers.
I enjoyed this sites articles on the O-RAN matter[1]. There is an entire subsection with articles on the recent industry movements.
[1]https://www.lightreading.com/open-ran/nokia-is-making-risky-...
You can have multiple different components.... Think of like building your desktop PC today - you can have CPU from AMD, the motherboard from ASUS, GPU from MSI, SSD from Intel, etc...
I guess if its not airplanes or cars, we can leave it to Silicon Valley to handle. Or is it only airplanes now?
/rant from Finland
The key problem is differentiation for network access providers. The business is highly infrastructure intensive and at the end of the day you take an IP packet, ship it to an interconnect and collect monthly payments. It is hard to see how such an industry where innovation is centered around bundling of tariffs for different access technologies is able to run more fragmented network technologies in cost effective ways.
So this is imho. all support PR to justify funding general EU tech investments. The US has venture funds the EU has research grants.
And they still will be, this just lowers the barrier for entry on smaller companies who might have some beneficial R&D but dont have to sell/lease their intelectual property to the big two.
I have worked at Ericsson and they're extremely patent hungry. Thats not a bad thing in and of itself, but it reduces significant competition when you can buy smaller companies IP or block them out of the market.
I bet the fibre connection to the not-Huawei 5G towers is going to be Huawei anyway.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/27/nsa-hacked-...
When Huawei was chosen for those fixed line projects it was providing relatively ‘dumb’ pieces of kit (switches etc.), with controller software that could be looked at and ringfenced.
The 5G stack has been implemented using much more virtualisation, and the vendors are providing much more general capability which makes it a lot harder to risk assess and probe for weaknesses etc.
Regardless, even if it was, it is still a huge potential problem. Imagine Huawei had some backdoor code that looked for a certain pattern of data across any of the network interfaces and corrupted the firmware so it wouldn't load without being physically replaced. China then buys a load of ads and as users browse the web, they load the image with the secret string in, triggering it (one example).
Within a couple of hours enough users have seen it that the vast majority of western infrastructure is down, and needs replaced (and I would assume in this case, China wouldn't be willing to sell more!).
I think this sort of attack would likely take down most 5G anyway - as it's incredibly likely that the backhaul has some sort of Huawei fibre product in it somewhere along the line.
China's strategic plan is spy and collect, not destroy. Traditional espionage stuff that every country does.
By compromising a large network provider they have the ability to access data from enterprise and government customers. Which as we saw when the US did it is very beneficial for trade negotiations etc.
Even NSA said their snooping on network infrastrucure was becoming useless with the leaked info on their monitoring, which was years ago.
I really don't see the value these days of being able to intercept traffic like this. You will obviously find bits and bobs that isn't encrypted but it's not like 20 years ago where you could get everything in a few days.
You're not wrong.
I keep thinking that if, hypothetically, i would be in charge of a developing economy, I would not recognise foreign copyright and patents untill the country can catch up, at least on medicine and software. Especially the idea that breaking copyright is a crime and not a civil offence is an absurdity
The issue with 5G is that there is a lot more software involved e.g. software defined networking, network function virtualization, edge computing, containerisation etc.
This makes securing the platform much more complex as you have to constantly validate that each piece of software is not able to access your core network or siphon user traffic.
Optical networks like you listed are pretty dumb so aren't nearly as much of a threat.
They can be tapped into still, of course. Doesn't GCHQ copy all the data coming through their fibre lines and run it through computers for analysis?
Slightly different threat model.
I’m missing something right?
Do you mean like they could disable the equipment and deny service?
It's implementing the security and 'ownership' of the data along the infrastructure thats at risk. And Huwawei don't have a good track record.
Whereas a lot of wireless components are more tightly coupled to each other.
Which is why many service providers are talking about Open RAN.
With all the competition on fibre equipments I really doubt.
It’s also absurd that EU would even consider using Huawei in the first place given their desire to achieve technological sovereignty.
Living in Berlin myself I can attest that very few people would believe that the state of Berlin could pull off such a feat, however, the federal government is (somewhat) better positioned for that.
EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications. No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure because it's reasonable to expect strong ethics and professionalism. It's completely opposite with Chinese companies. Really. This is a broad generalization to help navigate. Of course there are exceptions, many, in fact. I find it totally ironic that the CCP is recently cracking down on low level corruption in mid-sized firms in China (a good thing), while ignoring their own deeds.
Here is a good start how terrible German ethics are:
https://www.dw.com/en/image-problems-mount-in-corporate-germ...
And then my favorite case of corrupted to the core Siemens:
https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-the-massive-siemens...
At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Worse, unspoken threat and chilling effect executives and leadership team would have to appease the CCP members. There was a recent example of this - Jack Ma.
Now imagine the chilling effect it would send to the rest of the executives from small to large corporations.
Can I imagine Jeff bezos being arrested for committing a federal crime: yes
And that makes it right? Or are we on the "it's their culture, so we aren't allowed to be critical of it" bandwagon?
Sure? https://www.dw.com/en/internet-exchange-de-cix-accuses-germa...
Kind of like those anti-drug campaigns in schools where the police would tell you about all the different drugs and how not to use them. "This here is crack cocaine, it's like regular cocaine but cheaper and more effective. Most people put the crack rock into a glass tube and light it with a torch. Now smoking crack makes your body feel better than anything in the world. So don't do it." Then they tell you how to spot a drug dealer and let you know that most offer free samples.
Why isn’t encryption the solution here?
1. metadata leaks 2. denial of service backdoors - a real consideration for nations going to trade war with China and Huawei is pretty connected to the Chinese government
Also there is the problem that lot of tech is legacy and can not be easily upgraded for encryption (think SMS and mobile calls)
This certainly is not my wheelhouse, but I assume someone has made some attempts to analyze this?
China threads turn into whataboutism. Yeah obviously the West spies as well. But we don't tend to use that to steal IP and coordinate with our state-owned or virtually quasi state owned companies. Even if we did do that I'd rather the spying be on our side. Plus we do have some individual liberty protections (no matter how deteriorating) and can push for more/transparency (Democracy versus a dictatorship).
We're in confrontation already why give up such an important strategic asset?
I mean this is the whole reason we've got into the Brexit situation, by constantly casting blame on the EU for our own government's failings. But I guess that's the whole point in Democracy isn't it? Constantly blaming someone else, making up false accusations of someone else, and when they try to defend themselves, intensify the accusations.
I am also curious about where you think Huawei stolen the 5G IPs from? Or are you regurgitating false accusations without any evidence?
JUST YESTERDAY, we received an SDK doc from a well-known networking gear OEM that was encrypted using 3DES. [1]
[1] https://www.precisely.com/blog/data-security/aes-vs-des-encr...
I would go all the way and say that it is completely unreasonable to expect "strong" ethics from any company. There are just too many individuals involved with their own incentives.
It's like looking at MLB dopers and expecting european cyclists to be a better type of person and never dope. It will never happen that way. However, you could reasonably expect a sport whose governing body does regular testing of athletes and their gear to have less cheating. You could say that has nothing to do with ethics. It's about consequences.
This should be a very easy conclusion for anyone that has ever read about cheating in any kind of system. sports, finance, academia's replication crisis, scrabble tournaments... it is sad, but the most reasonable conclusion is to expect cheating and unethical behavior. It's just what people, including some very good people, end up doing due to pressure and being able to get away with something. And if it is profitable to just pay the fine and not do a recall, don't do a recall. Even if that means kids will die.
Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Germany for 5 years, and for the most part I love it, but the telecom situation is shocking. Speeds are slow, most people are still on DSL, and hardly a day goes by where I don't have at least a few minutes of random network blackouts, which is really great for working during a pandemic. A few weeks ago my home internet was down for 72 hours. Sometimes it feels like like when I have traveled in the developing world and the power just goes out sometimes and nobody makes a big deal about it because they're used to it.
Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively.
Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure.
It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol.
When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.
The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use.
And of course, you should not compare next gen access infrastructure with xDSL, as they are not mutually exclusive, and all countries have areas with degraded infrastructure on old technology, but also new infrastructure on new technology.
This is, again, completely unrelated to who makes the telco equipment.
Excuse me, but isn't this what you claimed in your original post? Quote: "If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment."
OP said: > > No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure > Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.
My intention was to note that the fact that German communication infrastructure is bad is not related at all to the manufacturer of ICT equipment, in the context of the quality of German (and European - in general) telco equipment manufacturers.
If Germany has bad infrastructure, and uses XYZ European ICT equipment manufacturer, this cannot be extrapolated to mean that XYZ is bad at making ICT equipment. The same applies to Huawei. The fact that some countries have good or bad infrastructure is not related to what equipment they use (at this point in time).
The end result being that quality of telco infrastructure is not an argument for or against any particular maker of equipment, because those two things are unrelated.
Any to underline why they are unrelated - simply because ISPs are profit-driven businesses and not tech playgrounds, so they will not invest in the latest and greatest equipment that XYZ/Huawei has to offer, instead they will milk the existing equipment and infrastructure dry and then switch to the cheapest new next-gen-access "thing" that exists for the next 20+ years. This does not mean that XYZ/Huawei doesn't have anything better to offer, it just means that the telcos do not want it.
German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government:
1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad.
2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
Before telling that EU or US should develop its own infrastructure for communications, think why it's not there already, and why it needs a boot from the government.
US, and EU largely nuked their own industries without any foreign spies blowing up bridges.
I cannot single out what's in particular what's solely responsible for demise of industrial economy in the West, but having tried it myself I can say that the sense of swimming against the current is omnipresent.
Don't just spray money, first think why doing so 10 times before did not work.
Even if they were to go up tenfold, it will not make that much of difference.
People who moan about labour costs making any difference to modern manufacturing are just keeping regurgitating a myth.
In fact, trained manufacturing labour costs in coastal China are now significantly passing that of US averages, and even more so of US flyover states.
Then comes the war or an empire falls.
Further they did so with the presumption that China will shed off its authoritarian tones as it grows. That didn't pan out as well.
I would say your assessment of this situation is pretty spot on - we need to ask Why and what led to centralization of manufacturing specifically.
If countries want to expand their silicon design and manufacturing capabilities, then they need to somehow get their citizens to study the relevant fields necessary to grow such industries.
American university graduates tend towards degrees related to business or healthcare. I'm not sure how countries like China, Korea, and Japan manage to graduate so many technical people.
Part of the issue is chicken-and-egg. It's hard to get a job in the field of chip design / manufacturing because there just aren't that many of those jobs available in the USA, outside of a few key regions.
From one side just any place in US, or EU, are 100000% better deal for people doing business on paper, yet you keep running in the overall "systemic apathy" towards boring businesses like manufacturing.
You all get all the welcome if you are doing something relatable to people making social elites like some hot shot VC business, and have a personal image of Musk Elon. You feel the entirety of society is ready to flex, and mold itself around you.
Now, try to come to some "high society" event, and complain that some absurd accounting law effectively shutting down your manufacturing business... People will not even look at you, if not trying to snub you.
You feel some kind of unease, or friction.
If I were to be in Russia, I will just know that bureaucrats are bastards, I will bare with them, and go doing my business later like if nothing happened. The negativity ends there.
In the West... But in the West, the most of the obstacle course only begins when you already pass the red tape. You will keep having to deal with the same impassionate attitude with your own employees, your professional community, every lawyer/banker/mba dominated circle be it a client, or a supplier.
While bad guys in Russia will hit you on the head, and take your money one way or another, the "bad" guys in the West will just say "we don't need you, your business, and your money, go away."
Berlin is a city state in Germany with is own local government.
Germans will know that Berlin city doesn't have this kind of money lying around ;)
The reasons for this are many fold, including that the Berlin government is pretty bad and as such the city has monetary and other problem all the time.
Also in difference to e.g. the US the capital city has not the same kind of special position, besides some small area in it the rest of it is fully self governed by the city state in the same way e.g. Bavaria is self governed by it's local government.
More info can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
But it’s irrelevant to this post , the goal is for Germany to get sovereign 5G Telecom Infrastructure, today it’s either China with Huawei or American antenna ( NSA + CIA ) with Ericsson.
One is a totalitarian regime devoid of basic human morality such as ripping out organs out of people for profit while they are alive , responsible for genocide of Uighurs and suppression of information and many many other stuff that is devoid of any dignity for humanity.
The other is a democratic hyperpower that Canada is also part of under the Five Eyes agreement.
If I had to choose between the CCP, Russia or America, it's America every fucking time.
edit: I took a look at your comment history and when you talk stuff like this I see where you are coming from:
A significant reason why Stalin was able to successfully rise to power and why the Bolsheviks were able to secure total power is because of foreign violence and interference.
the other commentators replying to you are correct. Your ignorance is quite disgusting.
Now ask that to the rest of the world.Not only to Five Anglo Eyes
Whether by racism or political calculus, US authorities do not seem to respect lives of citizens of third world nations.
US has kidnapped random people around the world to keep them in jail idefinately with no court or trial. It has killed thousands of people in drone strikes, in violation of international law, airspace and territorial sovereignty.
Add to that some invasions, and maybe you will start to realise why people in Russia/India/Vietnam/etc. do not trust US any more than they do anyone else when it comes to upholding international law. As a Britton/German/Canadian you don't have to worry about these things.
Additionally, if you consider territorial ambitions, various land disputes of old world nations are usually historical. As in "we will reverse some kind of injustice and get back some lands that belonged to our ancestors". That doesn't justify them, but one benefit of this is that they are predictable - China is not going to wake up one day to invade Somalia, but with USA you never know.
and China, Russia, North Korea does?
Seems you are not even aware of your own bubble!
Consider normal countries like India, lets not bring tinpot dictatorships and bana republics into this, unless thats your benchmark.
sure
a lot less bullshit abroad wars
care to tell us what US troops are doing in Afghanistan?
"7 October 2001 – present (19 years, 3 months, 3 weeks and 6 days)"
no.
There is evidence of organ harvesting of prisoners on death row, that seems clear. Morally that’s different ballgame to vivisection.
This is the reason why Canada maintained ties with Cuba, a Communist State, and did some limited military training with the USSR in the 1980s.
The US is the greatest peace-time threat to Canadian independence.
Nations have no friends. Only interests. It's sad, but it is how it is.
There othering of a whole nation is only going to make the situation worse. They have different political and cultural values and yes some morally questionable actions... but so do all countries.
In terms of Canada/US relations... Canadians were imprisoned (and put to death?) in China because of the very questionable US indictment of Huaweis CFO... how was that good for Canada?
Indeed, it's a situation where Canada won nothing and lost a lot.
The US will not help Canada in trade conflicts. In fact, most trade conflicts that Canada has are with the US. Equally, the US only helps Canada militarily as far as it furthers US interests.
Here is a good example. The only significant military challenge to Canadian interests right now are Russian claims in the Arctic. The US, instead of supporting Canadian claims, first made its own claims, and then argued that the territory should be under international jurisdiction.
States do not have friends. Only interests.
> The anti Huawei narrative is entirely political and not based on facts.
Are you saying that there are no security implications in having the CCP build and run your country's digital infrastructure?
Both Ericsson and Nokia barely make any profit, even amidst of what should be a 5G bonanza. They're famous for their perennial layoffs, constant cost-cutting, bland working conditions, outsourcing, infighting, insane level of bureaucracy and proliferation of management positions.
Huawei on the other hand, is well known for paying above-market wages (though long working hours), "poaching" skilled people from competitors, generous employee share scheme, valuing engineering above middle management, contributing to open source projects, and relative freedom their R&D personnel enjoys in tackling technical challenges. And their B2B offerings are the best value. And their consumer electronics is among the best value. And on top of that, they're highly profitable.
Even if you assert there's some secret money pump from CCP to Huawei, you cannot deny the fact that Huawei is a well-oiled machine that delivers. Pump billions into not only Nokia/Ericsson, but also IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle - the money would just get sucked into a black hole with very little to show for it. Huawei is portrayed as evil, because the alternative is to confront our weakness.
While this may be the case with some people with loose morals, don't put your words in my finger tips. I portray all major Chinese corps as the worst possible alternative in most cases because they are backed by a government with modern day concentration camps
I hang in the EU a lot lately. My friend takes corporate groups on tours of various places. She told me of one group from China last year who happened to see European reporting on protests in HK, while they were at a bar. The group's reaction was "what is this a joke? Are they being sarcastic? Is this a movie?" They had no idea what was happening in HK. A couple of them sent messages home to friends/family about the matter and within minutes all of their phones were disabled.
This actually happened. I want that government as far from me as possible.
There was wide National Support for the crackdown on HK protests, it wasn't controversial at all. The government didn't need to censor any of the media.
> I portray all major Chinese corps as the worst possible alternative in most cases because they are backed by a government with modern day concentration camps
So half of Europe and South America have modern day concentration camps, they just call them "Refugee Camps". In other Asia Pacific Countries (including Australia) they have "Immigration Detention Centres" (prisons for the persecuted). In the US they have Gitmo AND immigration detention.
In China they have Work Camps and Re-eduction camps.
I fail to see the moral high ground. Are you from a part of the world I missed?
OK, I give up being reasonable. Collect your 50 cents.
> I fail to see the moral high ground. Are you from a part of the world I missed?
I am not claiming any moral high ground. In fact, my experience tells me that anyone claiming the moral high ground for one country/race/group over another takes the risk of being a dangerous fool. This side of humanity will be our end if we do not grow out of it very soon.
Huawei is a legitimate threat from a country that doesn't have the same checks and balances as other countries e.g. free media, robust judiciary, democracy.
And it's not like network providers are specifically trying to secure their platform against Huawei. It's against anyone.
It doesn't matter if you're dealing with a dictatorship or a democracy when it comes to foreign policy. Both will kill you.