Comment by rzerowan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rzerowan | Hacker News Reader

Whose sovereignity though? And to replace it with what? As almost all 6G kit builds on 5G kit which is at most 40% Huawei FRAND patented.So whatever the path HW gets paid.

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.

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. Any dark factory should be running on its own wireless network anyway, not some cellular network. Who would do that? Even for a local wireless network, why would a Huawei router be any better?

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.

ignoring the weird moralizing about china, i think the parent comment is indeed referring to factories etc running their own 5G networks, that is very much a thing; ie aws used to have a private 5g offering, there are some open source projects, more that i can't remember

That's fair, I just don't see 5G or 6G being make-or-break for any kinds of manufacturing. Do any examples exist where this is the case?

To steelman some of the points youve posted

>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...

If you want to steel man the argument it’s worth acknowledging that China is also concerned with backdoors in what they import.

> 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.

The dollar value of the assembly lines isn't as important as the scale and architecture of the information that has to move.

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.

Why don't you steelman your own intial argument?

The good old ccp rule. You can tell how deranged a comment is by the number of times it has "ccp" in it.

> 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 reason I specify the CCP specifically rather than always stating China, is because the government is not "of", "by" and "for" the people. There are many Chinese people and only a small fraction of them are part of that government structure. The propaganda battle around whether Taiwan is a part of China or not also doesn't help.

The rest of your commentary suggests you need to broaden your horizons for where you get information.

We could start treating Chinese patents with the same respect they treated the rest of the world’s, maybe.

We could. But then we throw away the basis on how we treat European, Australian, Japanese, American, etc. patents.

You either respect patents or you don't. There is no middle ground.

Why would we change the way we respect those? None of those nations engage in the same uncompetitive practices that the Chinese do with respect to patents and IP.

> The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.

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.

The way most of these deals get structured especially when multicorps get involved is requiring the donor gov to guarantee the loan. Which gets routed to the recepient country, kickbacks get shaved off and re-routed back to the donor country. In this instance though my thinking is that for competeive pricing they would need volume , and prerequisite demand. This would be one way to generate that demand.In a way similar to the whole Tariff circus just more upfront.

Good attempt comrade. China + Russia + Iran fueling the war with Europe. They openly declare a war on way of living of western world . Sure , build critical infrastructure independently is insane.

Isn't it the other way around? I mean, I keep seeing western people advertising that the ways of living in those countries are wrong and they must change, while I don't often see anyone urging western countries to change their way of living.

The Russia, China, and Iran axis doesn’t exist. That’s American propaganda linking together three countries it dislikes.

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.

> China + Russia + Iran fueling the war with Europe.

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.

Does China enforce western patent laws?

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