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Huawei's equipment is almost too cheap to be able to ignore it. Here in Europe most telecommunication equipment (DSL, GPON, LTE radios, CPEs etc) installed in t

Huawei's equipment is almost too cheap to be able to ignore it. Here in Europe most telecommunication equipment (DSL, GPON, LTE radios, CPEs etc) installed in the past 5 years comes from Huawei and ZTE. I don't know whether Huawei and ZTE carry Chinese state backdoors in them, but if China had a plan to widely distribute equipment around the globe to be able to tap into any connection, it would have already succeeded.

rdlecler1 9y ago
Maybe consumers can ignore it, but governments won’t. Whether or not there are valid security threats, the US can use this to their benefit in the same way that China has used media control to their benefit. I see a bifurcation if two non-comadible but competing political systems which will include different hardware, operating systems and applications. It will be interesting to see which system has the ultimate Darwinian advantage.
- Narkov 9y ago
  Good point. The Australian government banned Hauwei devices from being used in the large scale National Broadband Network. https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/chinese-firm-huawei-banned-from-nbn-supplying-phones-to-australia-defence-20170616-gwsne4.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/chinese-firm-huaw...
  - kiwijamo 9y ago
    Meanwhile over the ditch in New Zealand we have no such restriction. I'm not sure if our equivalent to the NBN (the Ultra Fast Broadband [UFB] network) has much Huawei gear but I suspect there will be at least some depending on the LFC (Local Fibre Company). At the least many RSP (ISP) supplied CPE gear is Huawei and their gear at POPs is likely to be Huawei as well. Our wireless NBN equivalent (the Rural Broadband Initiative [RBI]) has one major telco using Huawei for 4G base station gear. I would hazard a guess that at least a third (if not more than half) of all traffic in New Zealand passes over at least one Huawei gear.
kiwijamo 9y ago
Here in New Zealand, two of our major mobile carriers use Huawei gear. One uses Huawei for the entire mobile network (from UMTS/LTE base stations to the core network) while another is migrating from Alactel-Lucent (which mostly powers their legacy 3G gear and I suspect their core network still) to Huawei (their entire 4G network as well as 3G at some of the new base station sites). The latter carrier apparently pitted Alactel-Lucent and Huawei 4G gear at a difficult rural test site to decide whether they'd go with AL (whose UMTS/3G gear had been fairly unreliable) or try their luck with Huawei. I presume Huawei must have beat out Alactel-Lucent to win the contract to deploy 4G—a decision that has proved to be successful so far. One major landline telco uses Huawei gear. Many RSPs (ISPs) deploy Huawei DSL/Fibre CPE routers—with some getting good reviews for Gigabit Fibre (which many other branded routers struggle with). Many cheap phones sold by the various mobile carriers (either own-brand or Huawei brand) is Huawei. While I can understand the distrust for Huawei, I can't deny they have done well when given the opportunity to do so. Alactel-Lucent (an US/EU company) in particular dropped the ball when one of our major telco had a major outage and it turned out they had a maintenance contract (so was AL themselves, not the telco responsible for maintenance of the network). Still took Alactel-Lucent's own experts a full week to restore telco services to a big chuck of our country. Severely dented our telcos' trust in US companies and thus encouraged the telcos to try Huawei instead. So far no major outages attributed to Huawai incompetence which has been a good plus so far.

rdlecler1 9y ago

Maybe consumers can ignore it, but governments won’t. Whether or not there are valid security threats, the US can use this to their benefit in the same way that China has used media control to their benefit. I see a bifurcation if two non-comadible but competing political systems which will include different hardware, operating systems and applications. It will be interesting to see which system has the ultimate Darwinian advantage.

Narkov 9y ago
Good point. The Australian government banned Hauwei devices from being used in the large scale National Broadband Network. https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/chinese-firm-huawei-banned-from-nbn-supplying-phones-to-australia-defence-20170616-gwsne4.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/chinese-firm-huaw...
- kiwijamo 9y ago
  Meanwhile over the ditch in New Zealand we have no such restriction. I'm not sure if our equivalent to the NBN (the Ultra Fast Broadband [UFB] network) has much Huawei gear but I suspect there will be at least some depending on the LFC (Local Fibre Company). At the least many RSP (ISP) supplied CPE gear is Huawei and their gear at POPs is likely to be Huawei as well. Our wireless NBN equivalent (the Rural Broadband Initiative [RBI]) has one major telco using Huawei for 4G base station gear. I would hazard a guess that at least a third (if not more than half) of all traffic in New Zealand passes over at least one Huawei gear.

kiwijamo 9y ago

Here in New Zealand, two of our major mobile carriers use Huawei gear. One uses Huawei for the entire mobile network (from UMTS/LTE base stations to the core network) while another is migrating from Alactel-Lucent (which mostly powers their legacy 3G gear and I suspect their core network still) to Huawei (their entire 4G network as well as 3G at some of the new base station sites). The latter carrier apparently pitted Alactel-Lucent and Huawei 4G gear at a difficult rural test site to decide whether they'd go with AL (whose UMTS/3G gear had been fairly unreliable) or try their luck with Huawei. I presume Huawei must have beat out Alactel-Lucent to win the contract to deploy 4G—a decision that has proved to be successful so far. One major landline telco uses Huawei gear. Many RSPs (ISPs) deploy Huawei DSL/Fibre CPE routers—with some getting good reviews for Gigabit Fibre (which many other branded routers struggle with). Many cheap phones sold by the various mobile carriers (either own-brand or Huawei brand) is Huawei. While I can understand the distrust for Huawei, I can't deny they have done well when given the opportunity to do so. Alactel-Lucent (an US/EU company) in particular dropped the ball when one of our major telco had a major outage and it turned out they had a maintenance contract (so was AL themselves, not the telco responsible for maintenance of the network). Still took Alactel-Lucent's own experts a full week to restore telco services to a big chuck of our country. Severely dented our telcos' trust in US companies and thus encouraged the telcos to try Huawei instead. So far no major outages attributed to Huawai incompetence which has been a good plus so far.