How trustworthy is this? There seems to be a lot of inside information, where did they get it from? Does anyone have corroborating links? All article links are either general, or US specific.
The sector is a pretty "closed shop" though, full of trade secrets and "proprietary" things. Underneath it all though, actually it's fairly simple once you get your head around it.
If you work closely with an operator, even as a client, you'll see examples of this - the number of people brought to meetings from the vendor, versus from the operator. Who answers the questions.
For a public example, see the Telefonica O2 outage in the UK (and Japan, I believe) due to an Ericsson certificate outage, and how much of a role Ericsson played in this. (https://www.theregister.com/2018/12/06/ericsson_o2_telefonic...)
Press releases also give bits and pieces away:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2019/11/orange-op...
https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/press-wire/9588-three-uk-join...
Although they might not give the level of detail you're looking for, it should hopefully corroborate things.
The whole industry is in a deepening downward spiral. Outsourcing and subcontracting is rampant, layoffs left, right and center. The combination of non-functional requirements that would make even senior FAANG fellows dizzy - left to be done by stressed out graying veterans or naive greenhorns, who leave the industry after 2-3 years for 50-100% raises elsewhere for the same skillset. Due to the monopsony power of the large operators, the vendors barely break even on their deliveries. There's no institutional knowledge buildup, nobody to take up the baton after the veterans retire, the vendors gave up pretending they care about being a nice place to work. If you're a techie, stay away from the telecom industry.
I’ve pointed it out in previous discussion that China doesn’t need back doors to western 4G/5G infrastructure, because it’s their people operating it.
But as with much other technologi our politicians are ignorant and forgetful.
It’s much worse to have a potentially hostile foreign state running core infrastructure than potentially have them install a back door.
Personally, I left the industry in 2006 and it was already very close to what's described in this article. I was working for a tier-1 vendor, sitting in the carrier's offices coordinating field work, and saw every facet of these interactions. (Technically I wasn't even working for the vendor, I was working for a contracting firm that had temped me out to the vendor, so it's even more abstract.) Institutional knowledge was held by project managers on the vendor's side at least as much as by the carrier's own staff.
Talk to literally anyone in the industry. I'd be surprised if you can find a single one who says it's not as bad as this article suggests.
Not that that’s everything but I would tend to trust Bert. Certainly, based on his tracks record, I don’t think he’d deliberately mislead.
How trustworthy ? It depends. Operators in developing countries those day might completely outsource buildout and management of their network to Huawei because they frankly have best end to end portfolio I think.
With operators in rest of the world, especially those that are "well established" reality is more complicated. Telecom networks having a lot of moving parts and require a lot of domain specific knowledge or proficiency with hundreds or thousands types of hardware and multitude of heavily customized per telecom needs software systems. For some of those things work might indeed be outsourced but in many cases outsourced work performed by people who function as company employees in day to day: i.e. they work in telecom office building, have employee badges, pass background checks, etc. Essentially this type of outsourcing is deeply embedded within telecom itself for a most part