Hacker News Reader

Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Oh, it's worse than that. Every house which uses Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) has to have Huawei equipment installed on the premises.

http://huaweihg612hacking.wordpress.com/about/

BT own the monopoly on the copper infrastructure and they are the only company providing high speed ADSL. If you want 80Mbps broadband, you have no choice but to use the Huawei modem.

The device is reasonably hackable (and, in fairness, complies with its open source obligations http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/technicaIndex.do?metho...) - but there's no real way of knowing what secrets the silicon holds.

So, the UK has sold off the line equipment, monitoring filters, and mobile infrastructure to one company. What could possibly go wrong?

View on HN

Interestingly, the BT router we had installed today appears to be from ECI Technology, Inc, an Israeli company. I had a quick look and I can't find them described as a Huawei shell or anything, only competitor. New back label, the rest looks the same as the Huawei one: http://www.imgur.com/0hJtXXH

>BT own the monopoly on the copper infrastructure

* Apart from in Hull[1]

>they are the only company providing high speed ADSL

* Apart from Virgin Media[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_upon_Hull#Telephone_s...

2. http://mediacentre.virginmedia.com/Stories/Virgin-Media-boos...

If you're going to be pedantic and point out minor inaccuracies of peoples posts at least be accurate yourself.

1. You don't need 100% of a market to be a monopoly.

2. Your second citation contains nothing about Virgin providing ADSL, they are primarily a cable broadband provider.

Virgin Media generally provide cable services rather than ADSL - maybe they offer ADSL in some areas? But your link doesn't mention that at all.

I believe Virgin offers ADSL outside of the coverage of their cable network, but then it is over BTs copper, just as all the other ADSL providers.

Virgin resell BT ADSL as a virtual ISP, like Tesco. It isn't just BT to the exchange, it is BT all the way if you cannot get cable and still go with Virgin.

You're right, we should go with US manufactured silicon. They are far more trustworthy.

You're being facetious, but the UK and the USA are in some of the tightest relationships of any countries ever. The Anglosphere runs deep with the "Five Eyes".

The UK absolutely and fundamentally should trust the US over China -- after all, the UK and the USA have no-holds-barred sharing of intelligence and spying, while the UK and China have literally no pact at all and are adversarial in that regard.

USA equipment would be orders of magnitude more safe for the British people, as by forming a pact with the US, the US has responsibility to the British government for the intelligence gathered (and vice versa on the mass amounts they collect on us through GCHQ!)

But to pretend that the US is guilty and the UK innocent is absolutely, egregious biased and false. They dragnet over 200 fiber interconnects and literally copy all internet traffic for analysis. They are not our victims, they are our brothers in arms. Don't forget that!

I don't know if it's possible to describe in words the affection that the American people feel for the other members of the Anglosphere - it's not quite brotherhood, because it's stronger than that.

With that said, I don't want anyone copying all internet traffic and sharing it with intelligence agencies. Of course, if I had to pick, I think I'd prefer it to be Uncle Sam doing it, but I fear the U.S. Government for drastically different reasons than I do China, in that the Chinese government is highly unlikely to be a threat to my basic freedoms and liberties, whereas the U.S. Government is looking more and more like they might be.

I do not see how the US government can pose a threat to the liberties of the UK people where the UK government does not pose a larger one.

No offense, but it wasn't the US pushing for Chinese-sourced mass censorship of your internet...

That's true, but Cameron can be run out of town if he pisses people off enough. We can't do anything about the US government.

"Crazy" conspiracy theory - China is under the control of the same group that has utter control of the US and the UK and to keep control, they create much of the chaos that we experience.

See: Mao Zedong (Yale graduate) and Every US Ambassador to China is a member of Skull and Bones.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. :)

>no-holds-barred sharing of intelligence and spying

Citation needed, except that by definition there can't be one, because if there were such a public claim, and an un-shared piece of intel existed (that in theory would refute it), then that intel could not be used publicly to refute the claim. Since the claim is irrefutable, it is also invalid.

So it's probably more accurate to say 'extensive sharing...'

brothers in arms in what? Destroying the Bill of Rights?

We' have literally fought wars together. Don't think you can take that lightly.

The colonists revolted because they were being denied their rights as British citizens. And before WWII we, and intermittently France, were the world's only major democracies.

The relationship is somewhat akin to ancient Greece and Rome, but closer.

> We' have literally fought wars together. Don't think you can take that lightly.

Well this is highest-level political commentary. Let's ignore the wars the US and UK fought against each other, and the times they allied with other countries. That one time the US and USSR fought a war together made them BFFs too...

In living memory, not so much.

Yeah, and 1945 sure wasn't living memory in 1961, eh

what for if you rape the freedoms now? fighting for what? survillance state?

We're talking about foreign spies conducting industrial espionage and gathering state intelligence data. That's much less likely to happen from the USA than China.

I don't know about that. A this point I wouldn't be too surprised to learn the US runs concentration camps.

I recently bought a Huawei phone from a large mobile phone dealer. £70 contract-free, with a dual-core processor and Android 4.1.

Is there something I should be concerned about with this thing? It is remarkably cheap and seems good quality so far. I'll probably put Cyanogenmod on it if they come out with it, though.

Something you personally should be concerned about? Doubtful.

> but there's no real way of knowing what secrets the silicon holds.

Technically, some places do melt down the chips with acid layer by layer and dissect what is actually in them. It isn't easy, and tough to miss things, though, I imagine.

Will be interesting if we go back to the days when stories like the US managing to get back doored chips into Russia which blew up pipelines and stuff are actually happening.

That looks like a standard VDSL2 modem to me. If you do not want Huawei equipment, is there any reason you couldn't purchase your own VDSL2 modem from anywhere and use that?

Houses which also have BT's 330mbps FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) service have Openreach modems also made by Huawei (I have it installed myself)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com