This is the key question! Both Europe and the USA took their eye off the ball. Europe's overly strict rules on "state aid" (giving public money to fund private

This is the key question! Both Europe and the USA took their eye off the ball. Europe's overly strict rules on "state aid" (giving public money to fund private sector work) mean that large, publicly traded telecoms companies are outsourcing their own R&D out to China, simply to save money. Few people realise, but that's where Nokia and Ericsson do a lot of their 5G R&D, and this can be verified with a quick dig around jobs and LinkedIn etc. Huawei is the recipient of large quantities of state aid domestically, as well as the beneficiary of inter-governnental loans from the Chinese government to other countries for the purpose of building a mobile network! https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-journal-calculated-huaweis-state-support-11577280830 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-journal-calculated-huaw... In terms of the USA, they don't have a significant notional domestic player in base stations - if we consider significant players as being Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei, and consider the former 2 as being mostly European. The obvious existing networking business to enter from the US perspective would be Cisco, and they weren't interested in this kind of low margin stuff (which says a lot about their other pricing!) https://www.ft.com/content/536d28c8-4e87-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5 https://www.ft.com/content/536d28c8-4e87-11ea-95a0-43d18ec71... (soft paywall, access via Google referrer)