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You can control the security risk without following US lead. US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for techni

You can control the security risk without following US lead. US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for technical reasons. Telecom infrastructure is strategic industry and US want's to prevent Chinese getting ahead. US can't compete directly because US is out from 4G/LTE/5G game and US based companies are only component providers (Qualcomm and others). >but nevertheless permitted it to compete for up to 35 percent market share in the country’s access network—that is, its antennae and similar equipment. There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security. Mobile networks involve huge number of components. The components and the software in the mobile core network and services pose more risk than base stations. Interfaces are standardized and you can buy different components from different vendors. European network operators (especially if they have government contracts) have silently limited what they buy from Huawei. Base stations and most hardware is OK. Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others. Many EU countries just "happen" to have one or two carriers with strategically shielded core networks without formally banning Huawei.

badrabbit 7y ago
There are European vendors like ericcson. This is about being cheap.
- adventured 7y ago
  This is a strange case where for some reason the EU isn't doing exactly what it very obviously should be doing: looking after its own self-interest and pushing European technology aggressively [1]. The EU should have taken the opportunity to severely deflate Huawei in the EU and push European alternatives. Europe needs to gain in tech and this is one easy way to do it, by supporting their own players, their own ecosystem. And it's a self-interest freebie at that: the US and EU interests are mostly aligned, there will be no push-back for supporting Ericsson & Co. The US would rather everyone use Ericcson than Huawei. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-eu-huawei-5g-networks-national-infrastructure-ban-usa https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-e...
  - Bayart 7y ago
    In many ways the EU plays by the rulebook of free trade : not discriminating between economic agents based on provenance, but on norms instead.
    - badrabbit 7y ago
      I don't know about that in this case. There EU members are supposed to have free tradr which means EU goods should have priority due to tax,tariffs and other issues I thought?
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    That's a short-sighted view of the EU's self-interest. If EU countries ban Huawei from their markets, then China bans EU car companies from its market. So, is it worth it to sacrifice VW and BMW in order to help Nokia and Ericsson?
    - badrabbit 7y ago
      Cars are not national communication infrastructure. I am sure China will prefer Huawei for their own mobile gear over nokia and ericcson as well.
      - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
        > Cars are not national communication infrastructure. Sure, but are you saying the tradeoff is worth it? It's fairly simple: if Europe begins taking protectionist measures that harm Chinese companies, then China will respond in kind.
- niyikiza 7y ago
  I agree. This thread discusses that with a historical perspective: https://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1221842546881679360?s=19 https://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1221842546881679360?s...
microcolonel 7y ago
> There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security. One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.
- thesimon 7y ago
  No association however to the identity of the phone owner. Phone billing records seem a lot jucier for that.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    How hard do you think it is, really, to get somebody's IMEI?
- Nokinside 7y ago
  I don't even know the level I should answer. To cut it short. No, those databases are not stored in base stations, not even close. They are part of core network. In LTE your handset talks to base transceiver station who talks to eNB who talks to MME who talks to HSS where the data is physically located. MME (Mobility Management Entity) is already part of the evolved Core Huawei has no access to that. Even MME keeps data just temporarily. This all happens in control plane. If Huawei supplies transceiver stations or eNB's it's nowhere near the point where it could store and distribute user information or track them and not be noticed immediately.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    It is not about where your metrics are conventionally stored. Your base station is measuring your gain, all the time; if all your base stations are Huawei, then you can be located quite reliably, then add the other signals the network gives the base station for QoS, this does not seem all that difficult. There is no reason that information can't be gathered through a different channel and analyzed. I don't know why y'all are lacking imagination all of a sudden on this one matter, but I hope you come around.
corporate_shi11 7y ago
It's not just about privacy and security. It's about not entangling your communications infrastructure with a Chinese company that - like all Chinese companies - is completely beholden to and embedded in the framework of CCP governance. Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc. We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.
- Nokinside 7y ago
  There is no vendor lock in in mobile network infrastructure. Everything is standardized trough and trough. You can buy components from different suppliers and they work together. >Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc. Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.
  - ethanbond 7y ago
    I don’t think anyone is saying they can’t purchase from someone other than Huawei. They’re saying that they aren’t purchasing from someone other than Huawei (at least for some proportion of the network which is, obviously, manufactured by Huawei). Vendor lock-in is not the issue. If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware (which is obviously insanely optimistic), that’s a problem. Wars have been won and lost with much less than 6 months of technological/infrastructural head start.
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      > If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.
cm2187 7y ago
Plus there is likely a fair number of chinese nationals employed by all their competitors. All it takes is one line of code.
kube-system 7y ago
> US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for technical reasons. Telecom infrastructure is strategic industry and US want's to prevent Chinese getting ahead. Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway, it would be Finland and Sweden who do. Supply chain trust has always been a primary concern of any kind of critical resource/infrastructure defensive strategy. Every time a country relies on another for a critical ongoing need, it introduces an inherent power imbalance that the supplying country can use as a leverage. This kind of stuff is centuries-old geopolitical strategy, and it's still in the news every day when we're talking about energy, food, minerals, etc. (e.g. Russian pipelines) Why is communications infrastructure any different? It's not.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Do you mean NOKIA and Ericsson?
  - freyir 7y ago
    Yes, those are the only cellular infrastructure companies besides Huawei. There was Alcatel-Lucent, but Nokia bought them a while back.
    - abainbridge 7y ago
      There's an emerging trend of service providers trying to virtualize their core network. Rakuten in Japan is a leading example. "They have assembled a small army of suppliers to build a virtualized network built on x86 hardware. ... Rakuten has no dedicated hardware except in its antennas, ensuring the upgrade to 5G will be straightforward. ... Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin said the network has "virtualized everything," including radio access, core, transport, IP, billing and operational support systems." I'm not sure who this army of suppliers is though.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway Why are you limiting US strategic interests to protectionism of private companies? It is in the American Interest (both private and public spheres) if "Made in China 2025" were to fail: Huawei is a just one front in that war. In this light, minimizing Huawei's market access with (even in the absence of domestic competitors) makes strategic sense: less experience in the market, less revenue, less R&D). Technological expertise tends to bleed into military applications
appleshore 7y ago
What about banning them for philosophical principles? Why would I buy anything from someone who denies Enlightenment principles and views human rights as “Western rights”? On a long enough timeline, authoritarianism always wins.
- sand_castles 7y ago
  Bro, America was founded as a slave state, and "human rights" only applied to white landowners. Calm down with rationalization based on ideological purity. If you do not want to buy Chinese stuff you are more than welcome ! but don't be surprised when Iphones cost 10,000 dollars. PS : While you are at it, could you also share some of that "human rights" with illegal migrants making your food please ?
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    damn, i guess this humans rights thing is just a sham after all. lets go round up some uyghurs, boys.
  - ksml 7y ago
    I feel like this is some slippery slope logic. Just because human rights violations exist elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore human rights violations in one place.
    - sand_castles 7y ago
      If you care so much about human rights, you are free to issue american passports to all the people you think are victims ? Last 2 time the americans cared about "human rights" they killed half a million iraqis, and turned a wealthy african country ( libya ) into a failed state. So I am not sure the Chinese or anybody else is going to welcome your imposition of "human rights".
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    False equivalence and moral relativism aren't the answers here. In the US, we're at least trying to do better.
otoburb 7y ago
>>Interfaces are standardized and you can buy different components from different vendors. You can buy components from different vendors, except that the overhead of working with thousands of different suppliers for your network is a non-starter, hence network operators around the world have moved to a model where they prefer large domain players to provide packages (e.g. 5G Access, 5G Core, 4G RAN, 4G EPC, etc.) to streamline purchasing, coordination, responsiveness and costs. >>Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others. Such extra components can be bought from others, except it should be noted that Huawei seems to provide very attractive prices for their "good enough" offerings in these other categories.

badrabbit 7y ago

There are European vendors like ericcson. This is about being cheap.

adventured 7y ago
This is a strange case where for some reason the EU isn't doing exactly what it very obviously should be doing: looking after its own self-interest and pushing European technology aggressively [1]. The EU should have taken the opportunity to severely deflate Huawei in the EU and push European alternatives. Europe needs to gain in tech and this is one easy way to do it, by supporting their own players, their own ecosystem. And it's a self-interest freebie at that: the US and EU interests are mostly aligned, there will be no push-back for supporting Ericsson & Co. The US would rather everyone use Ericcson than Huawei. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-eu-huawei-5g-networks-national-infrastructure-ban-usa https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-e...
- Bayart 7y ago
  In many ways the EU plays by the rulebook of free trade : not discriminating between economic agents based on provenance, but on norms instead.
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    I don't know about that in this case. There EU members are supposed to have free tradr which means EU goods should have priority due to tax,tariffs and other issues I thought?
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  That's a short-sighted view of the EU's self-interest. If EU countries ban Huawei from their markets, then China bans EU car companies from its market. So, is it worth it to sacrifice VW and BMW in order to help Nokia and Ericsson?
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    Cars are not national communication infrastructure. I am sure China will prefer Huawei for their own mobile gear over nokia and ericcson as well.
    - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
      > Cars are not national communication infrastructure. Sure, but are you saying the tradeoff is worth it? It's fairly simple: if Europe begins taking protectionist measures that harm Chinese companies, then China will respond in kind.
niyikiza 7y ago
I agree. This thread discusses that with a historical perspective: https://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1221842546881679360?s=19 https://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1221842546881679360?s...

microcolonel 7y ago

> There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security. One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.

thesimon 7y ago
No association however to the identity of the phone owner. Phone billing records seem a lot jucier for that.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  How hard do you think it is, really, to get somebody's IMEI?
Nokinside 7y ago
I don't even know the level I should answer. To cut it short. No, those databases are not stored in base stations, not even close. They are part of core network. In LTE your handset talks to base transceiver station who talks to eNB who talks to MME who talks to HSS where the data is physically located. MME (Mobility Management Entity) is already part of the evolved Core Huawei has no access to that. Even MME keeps data just temporarily. This all happens in control plane. If Huawei supplies transceiver stations or eNB's it's nowhere near the point where it could store and distribute user information or track them and not be noticed immediately.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  It is not about where your metrics are conventionally stored. Your base station is measuring your gain, all the time; if all your base stations are Huawei, then you can be located quite reliably, then add the other signals the network gives the base station for QoS, this does not seem all that difficult. There is no reason that information can't be gathered through a different channel and analyzed. I don't know why y'all are lacking imagination all of a sudden on this one matter, but I hope you come around.

corporate_shi11 7y ago

It's not just about privacy and security. It's about not entangling your communications infrastructure with a Chinese company that - like all Chinese companies - is completely beholden to and embedded in the framework of CCP governance. Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc. We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.

Nokinside 7y ago
There is no vendor lock in in mobile network infrastructure. Everything is standardized trough and trough. You can buy components from different suppliers and they work together. >Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc. Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.
- ethanbond 7y ago
  I don’t think anyone is saying they can’t purchase from someone other than Huawei. They’re saying that they aren’t purchasing from someone other than Huawei (at least for some proportion of the network which is, obviously, manufactured by Huawei). Vendor lock-in is not the issue. If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware (which is obviously insanely optimistic), that’s a problem. Wars have been won and lost with much less than 6 months of technological/infrastructural head start.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    > If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.

cm2187 7y ago

Plus there is likely a fair number of chinese nationals employed by all their competitors. All it takes is one line of code.

kube-system 7y ago

> US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for technical reasons. Telecom infrastructure is strategic industry and US want's to prevent Chinese getting ahead. Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway, it would be Finland and Sweden who do. Supply chain trust has always been a primary concern of any kind of critical resource/infrastructure defensive strategy. Every time a country relies on another for a critical ongoing need, it introduces an inherent power imbalance that the supplying country can use as a leverage. This kind of stuff is centuries-old geopolitical strategy, and it's still in the news every day when we're talking about energy, food, minerals, etc. (e.g. Russian pipelines) Why is communications infrastructure any different? It's not.

anticensor 7y ago
Do you mean NOKIA and Ericsson?
- freyir 7y ago
  Yes, those are the only cellular infrastructure companies besides Huawei. There was Alcatel-Lucent, but Nokia bought them a while back.
  - abainbridge 7y ago
    There's an emerging trend of service providers trying to virtualize their core network. Rakuten in Japan is a leading example. "They have assembled a small army of suppliers to build a virtualized network built on x86 hardware. ... Rakuten has no dedicated hardware except in its antennas, ensuring the upgrade to 5G will be straightforward. ... Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin said the network has "virtualized everything," including radio access, core, transport, IP, billing and operational support systems." I'm not sure who this army of suppliers is though.
sangnoir 7y ago
> Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway Why are you limiting US strategic interests to protectionism of private companies? It is in the American Interest (both private and public spheres) if "Made in China 2025" were to fail: Huawei is a just one front in that war. In this light, minimizing Huawei's market access with (even in the absence of domestic competitors) makes strategic sense: less experience in the market, less revenue, less R&D). Technological expertise tends to bleed into military applications

appleshore 7y ago

What about banning them for philosophical principles? Why would I buy anything from someone who denies Enlightenment principles and views human rights as “Western rights”? On a long enough timeline, authoritarianism always wins.

sand_castles 7y ago
Bro, America was founded as a slave state, and "human rights" only applied to white landowners. Calm down with rationalization based on ideological purity. If you do not want to buy Chinese stuff you are more than welcome ! but don't be surprised when Iphones cost 10,000 dollars. PS : While you are at it, could you also share some of that "human rights" with illegal migrants making your food please ?
- nyolfen 7y ago
  damn, i guess this humans rights thing is just a sham after all. lets go round up some uyghurs, boys.
- ksml 7y ago
  I feel like this is some slippery slope logic. Just because human rights violations exist elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore human rights violations in one place.
  - sand_castles 7y ago
    If you care so much about human rights, you are free to issue american passports to all the people you think are victims ? Last 2 time the americans cared about "human rights" they killed half a million iraqis, and turned a wealthy african country ( libya ) into a failed state. So I am not sure the Chinese or anybody else is going to welcome your imposition of "human rights".
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  False equivalence and moral relativism aren't the answers here. In the US, we're at least trying to do better.

otoburb 7y ago

>>Interfaces are standardized and you can buy different components from different vendors. You can buy components from different vendors, except that the overhead of working with thousands of different suppliers for your network is a non-starter, hence network operators around the world have moved to a model where they prefer large domain players to provide packages (e.g. 5G Access, 5G Core, 4G RAN, 4G EPC, etc.) to streamline purchasing, coordination, responsiveness and costs. >>Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others. Such extra components can be bought from others, except it should be noted that Huawei seems to provide very attractive prices for their "good enough" offerings in these other categories.