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Comment by sct202 | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't be too much of a worry since the next 2 largest vendors of telecom equipment are European (Nokia and Ericsson). Although, Nokia owns the remnants of a bunch of US companies like Lucent and Motorola Networks so they may be more connected to the US.

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Those are also compromised. Phillips telecoms used to have trapdoors for the NSA and so did Ericsson.

Some of the Nokia routers from the early 2000s made in Oregon also did allegedly.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/phone_tapping...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-...

The Greek wiretapping case involving Ericsson equipment was not due to a “trapdoor” but a malicious implant installed by a threat actor. This is documented in an excellent article by the IEEE [1]

Darknet Diaries produced a podcast on the whole affair which makes for great listening. The podcast episode includes additional details which have surfaced after the IEEE article mentioned [2]

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-athens-affair

[2] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/64/

I would say the biggest and most important chunks of both came from Nortel. Vast majority of what we consider as 4G and 5G was developed at Nortel and during the collapse was scooped up by Ericson/Nokia and Huawei (though the latter mostly just hired ex-Nortel researchers and engineers).

Not 5G. The reason why Huawei became a leader in 5G is that they created all their technology around the discoveries of Erdal Arikan and bet the whole farm on it:

https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-break...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdal_Ar%C4%B1kan

> Vast majority of what we consider as 4G and 5G was developed at Nortel and during the collapse was scooped up by Ericson

This is simply not true.

Source: worked for Ericsson for 17 years. Worker on both 4G and 5G / cloud native. Also worked with ex Nortel people.

> Vast majority of what we consider as 4G and 5G was developed at Nortel

Citation needed here.

The company was dead years before they drafted the first spec for 4G.

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