Germany to ban Huawei from future 6G network
bloomberg.com
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As an aside the whole OpenRAN debacle to replcae 5G kit seems to have peterd out after the initial hype. This move also ignores economies of scale - if the rest of the planet is on HW kit lowerig cost even with razor thin margins.The opps Nokia/Ericsson would either have to get massive subsidies to make financial sense or have a worse cost/benefit ratio.
One thing that gets glossed over though , is that the end user speeds/stability arent the main driver for 5/6G advancement (even though thats where all the marketing hype went) of course mobile device connectivity is growing and most users interaction online is primarily mobile. The big draw use case is the industrial and automation applications, where HW has a signifiant lead - from autiomated ports that aut load/unload to automated 'dark factories' that run without human intervention.Thats where the 'real' application is. The other use case for end users most likely will be in the autonomus cars and humanoid robots once they take off to any significant degree.
The only other way to make up the requisite volume from such an endeavor is one that Brussels was floating about a month ago. The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.Might just be the final nail in the coffin in EU efforts to retain friends and influence with the rest of the planet.Whose main concern is living a modern life with the infra not requiring you mortgage your childrens future.
So they only want to "save" the Planet and its (presumably poorer) people if said poorer people acquiesce with their imperialistic reflexes, tale as old as time when it comes to the West.
But not sure why would they need the Global South's money for all of this? Aren't they, the magnificent West, big enough to shoulder almost any costs? Especially when it comes to "strategic" concerns. Or so they were saying.
To me, this was never about 5G or 6G. This was always about CCP controlled network hardware getting installed across the globe taking advantage of a natural iterative next step in network improvement which would be fine if the CCP wasn't absolutely psycho and immoral, but they seem to be. I'm sure there are many well-meaning and smart people who work at Huawei, but unfortunately any advantage a Chinese company gets in a foreign market becomes potentially leveraged as CCP advantage and control.
Many countries leverage their companies abroad if something is important enough, but few countries are as bold or blatant as China in this regard. Nobody is worried about most of these countries excessively abusing their influence abroad, because most care about their reputation. China is basically untrusted by all of its neighbors and doesn't seem to care about authentic reputation over manipulation. To them, "harmony" just seems like a way to misspell "control". Balance to them means nothing if they aren't the center of gravity.
For as old and advanced as China has become, it discarded all of its slow wisdom to be wrong as fast as possible. Can a country like that really be trusted? No, it can't. There isn't any country on Earth that can be trusted 100%, but the CCP is just far below the threshold of even tolerable levels of trust.
There is nothing 5G or 6G provides that is worth letting the CCP control your networks. Aside from just spying or hacking, imagine World War 3 comes around and the CCP just decides it's time to shut off all our networks? Trust is almost always more important than speed.
>You don't need a crazy fast connection for most of this automation stuff, because it has to be able to operate offline successfully to start with
As i mentioned youre looking at it as a consumer, this is industrial systems.Its not about speed primarily but latency - costs of deployment and maintainance.Your COTS router is not being installed wher million dollar assembly lines are operating, and for any serious business concern low opex/capex are first and foremost as well as reproducibility for expansion. KUKA robot arms are not being connected to TPlink routers.Together with the nature of Just-In-Time manufacturing , instant data for maintainance and logistics is crucial. Ditto for the automated ports [1]
>There is nothing 5G or 6G provides that is worth letting the CCP control your networks. Aside from just spying or hacking
The two standards are currently accelerating both consumer and industrial changes worldwide.There are some networks in GlobalSouth countries whose speed/latencies will rival even those deployed in major US cities. Its a question of leveraging future infrstructure for productivity and improving living standards.
As for espionage and hacking that was stillthere even with dialup modems and fax machines.
Regarding countries using their leverage via multicorps abroad , you really should read up on the US CLOUD act, patriot act etc and cast a cursory glance at entities as benign sounding as Nestle(child slaves in W.Africa) Chiquita(Death Squads in S.America) PullMan Cigarettes (suing to block ati cigaratte ads in SE.Asia) ,not adding historical ones like Swiss CryptoAG.
In short multicorps are immoral profit extracting entities and on the global stage they act sometimes directly with their parent county to further whatever agandas they have. Thus far no Chinese companies have been implicated in any such shenanigans - as im pretty sure if it had happened it would be published about in banner headlines 24/7/365.
As it stands all the accusations are simply alllegations of a future scenario , which most people specify any sensible person should be able to mitigate with good security architecture and practices.
[1]https://govinsider.asia/intl-en/article/how-huaweis-5g-solut...
> allegations of a future scenario
There’s been plenty of CCP aligned hacking, backdoors, and industrial espionage people can point to. Expecting a bad actor to continue there behavior is a little more than allegations of a future scenario.
I could see scenarios where there is a high level of variability on the line and it requires a very large machine learning model to process the many possible variations, so maybe you send a realtime video feed or still images to a server and try to optimize for the fastest response time rather than paying to run all that compute at each station. Maybe you're doing this for 5000 stations.
You can also imagine small instructions needing to arrive with very low latency where bandwidth isn't the issue really and straight line of sight wireless should presumably be the lowest latency.
Neither of those problems require or justify Huawei anything and those are not likely to be most factories.
> Its a question of leveraging future infrstructure for productivity and improving living standards. As for espionage and hacking that was stillthere even with dialup modems and fax machines.
You don't improve the lives of future generations in your country by letting an adversary control your infrastructure. That is easy. Why would you even consider that? There's a list of priorities. You aren't starting at the top.
> Regarding countries using their leverage via multicorps abroad
No doubt, people should always push back against any companies proven to be doing things that are problematic. It doesn't only apply to countries. Still, I restate my point about trust. A lot of these companies (and countries) legitimately care about their reputations, not only because a destroyed reputation can hurt their profits (if you believe that's all they care about, which is very cynical), but because many people would rather do the right thing than the wrong thing if given the choice.
Sometimes these organizations are so big, they don't even know all the details about what's happening at the ground level until it gets reported on by 3rd parties.
In terms of US government influence over networks, the US government is structured very differently. In the US, it's a national tradition to not excessively trust the government, because the history of the world says that's a bad idea. If the US abuses its trust to a critical degree, it can face pushback in a real way that isn't even allowed in China. I believe in the feedback mechanism loop within the US more than what China has, by far.
Your argument comes across very empty to me in this regard.
> CCP wasn't absolutely psycho and immoral
As opposed to what? The US? The EU? Germany? Seems like the CCP is the least psycho and immoral of the bunch.
> but few countries are as bold or blatant as China in this regard.
China is the least bold and blatant out of the major players.
> Nobody is worried about most of these countries excessively abusing their influence abroad
Everyone is. It's just that "those countries" are in no position to fight back against the US.
> Trust is almost always more important than speed.
If trust was important, then germany woud choose "ccp's" huawei. After all, it's germany's "allies" that spy on them the most. And the "ccp" would win by providing the world with the most trustworthy network hardware.
The rest of your commentary suggests you need to broaden your horizons for where you get information.
You either respect patents or you don't. There is no middle ground.
Iran has loose relations with both which are not dissimilar to the one it has with the EU. Its conflict is also fairly limited to Israel and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Russia and China have an ambivalent relationship where they are key economic partners with complementary economies but have no official military alliance and are somewhat wary of each other as Russia fears a potential Chinese invasion.
It's the other way around. Europe fueling war with china + russia + iran.
It isn't china sending warships along german, british, european coastline. It wasn't russia that overthrew democracy in ukraine. And it isn't iran bombing europe.
> They openly declare a war on way of living of western world .
No. You once again have it backwards. It's the western world declaring war on them. The genuine head scratcher is why china, russian and iran haven't formally joined forces to fight back.
Good to know it's not just China.
> Merz ruled out fully decoupling from China, which is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner. “We can’t do that,” he said. “China can’t do that, but we can do it even less.”
And even better to know that the move is practical and understands who has the upper hand.
This is all just talk. Either there are very real security concerns or someone lobbied heavily.
If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you. They're using this to hide the real reason for the move, which is to do Washington's bid, just like a good colony does.
The US has troops, tanks, aircraft, even nuclear weapons stationed in German.
Sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States is not something on the table.
Some of these things are already here.
China has so many anti-Foreigner laws for doing business in China.
West has made China rich and powerful in exchange for cheap labour.
Europe never set any boundaries. Honestly our fault.
Let’s face it, nobody would care if China just would be a subordinate receiver of orders.
As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
Was there? It seems to me trade and offshoring continued even after they became a competitor. And then continued after they strong-armed Western corporations to invest in China [1], destroyed Western corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,4.1], after they extracted groveling apologies from Western firms [5], and after they started operating literal police stations on Western soil [6], while turning Western countries into subordinate receivers of orders [7,8].
I guess you were hoping your framing would guilt people into not seeing the threat?
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673
[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro...
[4.1] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2...
[5] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
[7] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
[8] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...
domestic production or nothing. the "service economy" is a stupid concept.
You’re equating things that corporations are doing as if that’s in the best interest of the American state.
China is being seen the way it is by white people and white societies because they see a competitor.
"if your business practices are not immoral, then you're not doing it right!"
Unfortunately. With around 500m customers, we could be powerful. But we arent: Stumbling upon our own feeds.
The European mentality has real, tangible upsides for its continent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well in a larger world where other actors don’t share the same experience and values.
Just wanted to put that into perspective.
China shouldn't complain, especially don't bitch about racism.
The "most racist" places are typically the most diverse and most multicultural. They have more exposed tissue than places where minorities make up single digit percentage points, so you see injustices more often in these places. And it follows that it gets reported on at volume.
By that same coin, these places also have more friendly interactions by volume than places without diverse racial makeups. You just don't see that reported because it's not news.
America, "racist", simply has a very diverse population.
The American South, "racist against Black people", simply has the nation's largest population of Black people almost to the point the racial makeup is bimodal.
Texas, "racist against Latinos", - same thing.
You see the bad apples, but you don't see the overwhelming degree to which society works with people together in a melting pot.
I grew up in the South, where every second person is Black. I fly to SF where there are barely any Black people at all and have dinner conversations with people calling my region racist. Sometimes the people saying these things grew up in all-white cities in New England. I have to laugh inside.
Not really:
https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-...
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".
China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.
Now people claim they stole their IPs through JVs and that's why they are good at making EVs, this theory doesn't add up.
Also, what China offered is a vast untapped market, no one forced these companies to go to China to set up JVs and start picking up gold down the street, this was way before WTO and China was not at all obligated to open it's market, let alone for free.
Now ask one question, what the EU has to offer to "force" China to set up JVs? Guaranteed billion dollars profit?
EU car market is crowded and full of incumbents, Chinese cars represent a low single digit market share despite the weekly "China is taking over the EU car market" news article.
Countries hitting their industrialization stride have a bloom of real world applicable talent that they can direct to these things in a way that is a little harder for others. Especially when you have a huge population.
Air pollution was also a huge problem, aside from national security. China's empahsis on STEM and the fact that they've been a huge source of engineering/science/tech talent meant China could just tap its own human resources rather than making them go abroad for decent jobs. The fact that they also know how to build things and have set up all the infra for that is just another bonus.
China is willing to play ball in less developed countries, and the deals they setup is not just Chinese companies coming in and dominating the market, they are also partnering with and trying to raise local companies as well. That won't work in Europe or the US, at least for now.
The whole Belt and Road initiative seemed to mimic a Korean style labor export to increase the inflows of currency into the country while keeping people employed, but I also kind of figured it was aimed at reducing the friction of future resource transportation between the countries.
This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.
I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.
++1
Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.
Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.
Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.
All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
The liberalism and freedom stops once too much money flows out of your part of the world, hence companies like palantir popping up like mushrooms. No one likes to be made fun of when they are in a declining trajectory.
They didn’t cheat, we did.
China didn’t force the west to make them their workbench.
China isn’t the first authoritarian country the western industry loved as workforce.
No human wasn’t a negative, it was one of the main selling points.
A huge part of the software industry is there because of explicit GPL-style agreements defang the intent of IP laws while working inside the legal requirements they impose. The west should allow good ideas to be deployed in its own industrial processes.
Who forced 'the west' to do that? American and European companies lived well this way for decades. Buying from and selling to China has been highly profitable. In fact Germany is doing terribly right now as China is buying LESS than before. So the answer is to do... erm... even less trade?
Trumpian anti-globalist idiocy is growing in people's minds like a brain cancer
Nortel was severely hit by the bursting of the tech bubble, and then it got caught faking its financial figures. To blame that on Huawei is just a rewrite of history.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-hit-by-suspected-chi...
The concern comes from the legal environment these companies operate in. Any vendor that can be compelled by its government to cooperate in ways we can’t verify becomes a risk in critical infrastructure.
As the west detaches from China, for quite plausible security concerns, it's going to find it expensive on both ends: they will be paying more and getting less.
Who do you think hacks our hospitals? Who do you think attacks infrastructure? Some kid in Lebanon isn’t going to attack a hospital. We’re at war, everyone knows it but us.
My connection is 1.5 Gbits at 3am, but at peak time (7pm) I'm lucky to get 10 Mbits.
My network needs more capacity, and if 6G can offer it cheaper than building 5x more 5G masts, that's the route they'll have to take.
Currently being researched:
> 6G aims to achieve higher data rates, lower latency, and greater energy efficiency than 5G.[8] Planned advances include new air interface designs, improved coding and modulation, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.[9] Research also explores integration with satellite, Wi-Fi, and non-terrestrial networks, as well as distributed edge computing for AR, VR, and AI applications.[10]
"According to the NGMN Alliance, 6G development should focus on demonstrable user needs and avoid unnecessary replacement of existing 5G radio access network equipment."
I guess it will be 3/4/5G for a while, until they can someday cover the country just barely, and then 6G a decade and half later than everyone else (or is it by giving up sovereignty by buying US stuff instead?)
Sorry for being hopeless, but Germany has been very good at proving its inability to fix telco issues (or its train issues…).
China for years has been allocating a share of the market to European gears, considering their domestic offerings are much cheaper, this was basically a reciprocal gesture, but it's not needed now for neither side.
Germany has been reluctant to completely remove its Huawei gears, but now that German cars are losing ground in China, they probably felt it's time to make the move.
Because if something can't be sold under brand X specifically, then brand Y will be invented to circumvent it, hence it's a superficial and ineffective process to forbid a brand by name.
Rigorous audit and compliance processes should assure products are tested, supported, and hopefully minimize the risks of hostile anti-functionality.
Perhaps some key tech bits are so fundamental that they should be grown domestically without necessarily a huge profit motive to offer reliable components for strategic infrastructure.
I have never seen anything but the various broad claims in the news and by politicians that seem to always just kind of come down to “China bad” as evidence. Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof.
Thanks for providing anything you might be able to point me towards that goes beyond “China bad”, regardless of how anyone feels about China.
Try to use their routers as someone with needs greater than "get into the internet". Their UI is horribly slow and clunky, you'll need to reboot them every few months because something hangs itself and about every year or two they manage to get 0wned by a wormable exploit. On top of that, analyses have shown their firmware to be utterly rancid [1], although I do admit that this analysis is six years old.
> Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof.
The thing Western politicians are afraid of is running into another scenario like in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Viasat was hacked by the Russians leading to serious outages [2], or that the equipment - particularly anything with radios attached - can be "remote bricked" similar to how Israel detonated Hezbollah's pagers. It's bad enough we can't be sure that our own equipment is reasonably secure from cyber attacks, but Huawei is a complete blackbox. We need to prepare for a war scenario with China, either directly (the worst case), but at the very least as a side effect of an invasion of Taiwan. In either case I expect the CCP to behave like Mossad, cripple us piece by piece.
Even if the CCP never decides to invade Taiwan, it still makes sense to refuse their companies entry into our markets as long as our companies aren't welcome in theirs. I am a big friend of reciprocity and China hasn't given us much.
On top of that, Huawei was under fire for alleged sanctions violations and IP theft [3].
[1] https://www.securityweek.com/many-potential-backdoors-found-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/13/huawei-ne...
https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intell...
If you ever worked in 5G/6G/Wifi/etc. standardization you will quickly see one thing: they know their job.
So even if you rip out all Chinese hardware - you will still have to pay money to them if you replace it with local stuff from Nokia/Ericson/etc.
It would be as if I wrote a sentence, "The EWG was created by the treaty of Rome in 1957".
What is EWG? Oh yes its the German abbreviation for the EEC. But we're writing in English?
The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.
Because bashing all things American while ignoring the threat posed by China is part of Europe's cultural DNA.
Can you still say this with a straight face with everything that is coming from Washington?
May I introduce you to a somewhat recent concept people like to call AI.
Sounds pretty untrustworthy to me.
If you don't like what the EU Commission is doing, you can vote them out. (Just kidding, no you can't.)
Now any country can make a chip that plugs into the networking device. Just buy your own country's spyware-laden chip, plug it into the NID. Install your software in the NID, the same way you'd install Linux on an AMD vs Intel computer. Works for PCs; it can work for routers (they're all just computers). Choose open source or an expensive proproprietary OS. Choose open hardware or proprietary hardware. Let people assemble them from parts so they can choose their level of surveillance-avoidance.
And you're done. No more banning entire manufacturers; just ban those specific kinds of chips, but buy the cheap chinese hardware sans-chips. Feels a lot more sustainable than global instability and trade wars over what is essentially just a lack of design.
(I'm aware how specialized router hw/sw is, I worked for Cisco once upon a time. but it can all be abstracted. it's just not in the interest of corporate profits to do so; but at this point, i think ramping down the china-phobia and stabilizing trade is a bigger concern)
However I wonder if that will remain true with 6G, or if it will even be affordable.
And some even shill the conspiracy that the NSA will install backdoors in US equipment... I would like to think it's Chinese agents at work, but most likely it's regular people.
For this reason I'm glad politicians are taking the initiative, despite the population's awareness of what Huawei really is. And sry but I don't have time to "prove it with irrefutable evidence" as some may demand. Plz spend your own time researching the facts.
In any case, I do hope that outsiders in this thread realize this isn't indicative of what Westerners think, so as far much as what their enemies are thinking. Do you really think people like these who are so quick to mock Europe are really your friends?
We are very far from the "imagine all the people, living live in peace". I wonder why that is...
How Isaac Asimov said in "Relativity of wrong":
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together".
The book basically argues that a significant amount of the world is headed for destabilization, and a destabilized world involves a lot less trust.
Side note: personally, I find the writing style and general tone to be hyperbolic, but some of the analysis is interesting.
So this left and is going to leave a lot of power gaps around the globes, and regional wars are picking up paces.
China is not particularly happy about this, because it is not ready and perhaps don't even want to be the next world police. US has always wanted China to share the responsibility but China is hesitant, which is understandable. Plus most of the people in China do not want a destabilized world, for now.
What I'd expect that China will gradually lose steam (actually people on HN already observed since like 10 years ago) when the people born in the 1970s/1980s retire. The officials who are resistant to the idea of expansion (because it damages their power base) are going to retire then. I'd expect the world to be a LOT hotter then. So that's about 2030-2040 and might come a bit earlier as the other players are already moving the pieces(e.g. Russia).
Not sure how to prepare my family through that time, though. I mean, it's just my guess, so my wife just rolls up her eye and wants to buy more houses/stocks because "houses/stocks always go up if you look at the chart". What I think is that the whole economical-geopolitico logic is going to change forever, and what is gone is gone for good. The next globalization is maybe 50 years away but we will never see it. From hindsight, I believe the 2008 financial crisis was the turning points. They managed to drag it for another 20 years, which I send my kudos.
Again, just my guess. I have always wronged in the pessimistic side so I hope I'm wrong this time again.
The west went wrong when it stopped checking capitalism