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Germany to ban Huawei from future 6G network
- jusonce56789 1y agoWell, people will buy Huawei routers at home anyway.
- wnevets 1y agoIs that commonplace in Germany?
- mschuster91 1y agoSadly yes, cheap crap tends to be Huawei. Everyone with a modicum of technical understanding goes for a Fritzbox though.
- looofooo0 1y agoI do Openwrt on my HP
- hopelite 1y agoI’m not familiar with the Huawei matter because it’s similar not something I have to concern myself with, but can you point to something specific or a place where I could get some facts on why Huawei is justifiably frowned upon? I have never seen anything but the various broad claims in the news and by politicians that seem to always just kind of come down to “China bad” as evidence. Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof. Thanks for providing anything you might be able to point me towards that goes beyond “China bad”, regardless of how anyone feels about China.
- mschuster91 1y ago> I’m not familiar with the Huawei matter because it’s similar not something I have to concern myself with, but can you point to something specific or a place where I could get some facts on why Huawei is justifiably frowned upon? Try to use their routers as someone with needs greater than "get into the internet". Their UI is horribly slow and clunky, you'll need to reboot them every few months because something hangs itself and about every year or two they manage to get 0wned by a wormable exploit. On top of that, analyses have shown their firmware to be utterly rancid [1], although I do admit that this analysis is six years old. > Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof. The thing Western politicians are afraid of is running into another scenario like in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Viasat was hacked by the Russians leading to serious outages [2], or that the equipment - particularly anything with radios attached - can be "remote bricked" similar to how Israel detonated Hezbollah's pagers. It's bad enough we can't be sure that our own equipment is reasonably secure from cyber attacks, but Huawei is a complete blackbox. We need to prepare for a war scenario with China, either directly (the worst case), but at the very least as a side effect of an invasion of Taiwan. In either case I expect the CCP to behave like Mossad, cripple us piece by piece. Even if the CCP never decides to invade Taiwan, it still makes sense to refuse their companies entry into our markets as long as our companies aren't welcome in theirs. I am a big friend of reciprocity and China hasn't given us much. On top of that, Huawei was under fire for alleged sanctions violations and IP theft [3]. [1] https://www.securityweek.com/many-potential-backdoors-found-huawei-equipment-study/ https://www.securityweek.com/many-potential-backdoors-found-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack [3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/13/huawei-new-us-indictment-decades-long-steal-technology https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/13/huawei-ne...
- heinternets 1y agoLook at the Wikipedia article “criticism of Huawei” for a massive list of IP theft, espionage, backdoors and more, including references.
- iso1631 1y agoI've only encountered a fritzbox in Germany, it's amazing how ubiquitous they are in Germany, yet so unknown elsewhere in Europe let alone elsewhere.
- sunaookami 1y agoNo, nobody in Germany uses Huawei routers. All big ISPs provide FRITZ!Boxes.
- pelasaco 1y agoTBH the solar stack from Huawei, Slim modular batteries and Inverter are pretty solid. https://solar.huawei.com/en/products/luna2000-5-10-15-s0/ https://solar.huawei.com/en/products/luna2000-5-10-15-s0/
- juliusceasar 1y agoBetter late than never. China has so many anti-Foreigner laws for doing business in China. West has made China rich and powerful in exchange for cheap labour.
- NoiseBert69 1y agoI'd more say: they made clear rules if you want to play business in China. Europe never set any boundaries. Honestly our fault.
- lazyeye 1y agoOur leaders in the West have been very naive. Also the Chinese "elite capture" program has been very effective.
- croes 1y agoYou mean old we-don’t-care-bout-human-and-environmental-rights trick? Let’s face it, nobody would care if China just would be a subordinate receiver of orders. As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
- jajuuka 1y agoAnd that is the core contention for the anti-China rhetoric. That they are a competitor. There are a billion and one reasons people say they don't like China, but the core issue is competition.
- dragonelite 1y agoChina was suppose to become a giant sweatshop which would be allowed to gain subsistence wealth. Just enough to produce and consume western product but not wealthy enough to ever outgrow their station in the world.
- like_any_other 1y ago> As soon they became a competitor there was a problem Was there? It seems to me trade and offshoring continued even after they became a competitor. And then continued after they strong-armed Western corporations to invest in China [1], destroyed Western corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,4.1], after they extracted groveling apologies from Western firms [5], and after they started operating literal police stations on Western soil [6], while turning Western countries into subordinate receivers of orders [7,8]. I guess you were hoping your framing would guilt people into not seeing the threat? [1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secret-deal-with-china/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673 [3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-military-attack-on-nortel/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita... [4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overproducing-green-tech/a-68782157 https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro... [4.1] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2a7cf https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2... [5] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe-idUSKBN1FQ1FJ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_service_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic... [7] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-what-s-really-in-it-for-canada-1.2770159 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha... [8] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting-hong-kong-protests-removed-by-massey-university-within-12-hours https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...
- avipars 1y agohttps://archive.li/18QJs https://archive.li/18QJs
- daneel_w 1y agoGood. Don't forget their incredibly affordable and attractive smartphones and the fact that they have almost completely captured the market for cellular transceiver chips used in USB mobile modems, both of which are excellent products for espionage and weaponization just like their cellular network equipment.
- immibis 1y agoIf secure phones were legal, we'd be treating the modem chip as part of the hostile network - the application processor would encrypt all data before sending it.
- RobotToaster 1y agoAnd use American Cisco equipment with definitely no NSA backdoors instead?
- personomas 1y ago[dead]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 1y agoThat is called being on the other side of an airtight hatch (h/t Raymond Chen) The US has troops, tanks, aircraft, even nuclear weapons stationed in German. Sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States is not something on the table.
- daneel_w 1y agoIt's an east vs west thing.
- qwertox 1y agoAt the current rate the US will become an "even further east".
- jabron 1y agoWhat does this even mean?
- exasperaited 1y agoWhat it means is that in the future Europe will have to consider a Trumpist USA to be like a 21st Century version of a totalitarian Eastern Bloc or Soviet country: Orbanism, absurd projectionism, dangerous allies, the state demanding a share of businesses and directing sales and mergers, openly describing the EU (and now the UK) as not friends or even as enemies, trumped up prosecutions of political enemies, assuming that foreign surveillance is built into its products, etc. Some of these things are already here.
- jiehong 1y agoWhich company will design and make 6G telco hardware in Germany? I guess it will be 3/4/5G for a while, until they can someday cover the country just barely, and then 6G a decade and half later than everyone else (or is it by giving up sovereignty by buying US stuff instead?) Sorry for being hopeless, but Germany has been very good at proving its inability to fix telco issues (or its train issues…).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sabjut 1y agoBoth Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden) are great european alternatives. There is no need to reinvent the wheel in every EU country.
- PeterStuer 1y agoBoth Nokia and Ericsson have substantial Blackrock and Vanguard investment.
- nemomarx 1y agoblackrock and vanguard do index funds, yeah? They have substantial investments in everything on the market that's doing well enough to get on indexes. I don't see how you can avoid that?
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- tonetegeatinst 1y agoI know some open 5G hardware project exists as I read about it about a month ago. However I wonder if that will remain true with 6G, or if it will even be affordable.
- mannanj 1y agoWhy 6g? who asked for it? I am content with 4g, 5g was a push as it was.
- daneel_w 1y agoYou and I are content with it, but these standards were never really about our individual and immediate experiences. It's about concurrent capacity for the growing grid as a whole.
- Zigurd 1y agoUnless you live in an urban environment where millimeter wave is competently deployed, you should curb your contentment with 5G. 6G sounds like a distraction from the lack of full 5G capabilities in most places.
- PeterStuer 1y agoThey are not wrong, but will they also ban Cisco in their "Sovereignty Push"?
- anonporridge 1y agoWhy should they? The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.
- tharne 1y ago> Why should they? Because bashing all things American while ignoring the threat posed by China is part of Europe's cultural DNA.
- anonporridge 1y agoDitto Russia.
- fleischhauf 1y agolaughs in unhinged head of state that imposes arbitrary tarrifs on half of the world and mistakes dementia test for IQ test, says it's difficult
- 978689757846 1y agoYour deranged rambling isn't too coherent, either.
- hiimkeks 1y agohttps://archive.is/tDC0W https://archive.is/tDC0W https://archive.is/IQyBG https://archive.is/IQyBG and this was before the US elected an overt fascist
- nguyenkien 1y agoarchive.is down. Perhaps you mean archive.today
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoIs 6G even a thing? From either a bandwidth demand perspective or a financial perspective? Every US wireless service just about bankrupted themselves rolling out 5G.
- londons_explore 1y agoBandwidth demand is very much there... My connection is 1.5 Gbits at 3am, but at peak time (7pm) I'm lucky to get 10 Mbits. My network needs more capacity, and if 6G can offer it cheaper than building 5x more 5G masts, that's the route they'll have to take.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoI guess you must live in a much more heavily populated environment than I do. For myself, I'm still trying to figure out remote 5G IOT connectivity that doesn't require $1k in hardware. Non-consumer-grade 5G hardware is incredibly expensive still, which is why we are still deploying new 4G stuff.
- throw0101c 1y ago> Is 6G even a thing? Currently being researched: > 6G aims to achieve higher data rates, lower latency, and greater energy efficiency than 5G.[8] Planned advances include new air interface designs, improved coding and modulation, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.[9] Research also explores integration with satellite, Wi-Fi, and non-terrestrial networks, as well as distributed edge computing for AR, VR, and AI applications.[10] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6G
- Zigurd 1y ago5G is a thing (5Ge excepted). 6G is aspirational and recycling use cases that go all the way back to 3G, like telesurgery. It's going to stay aspirational at least until 5G millimeter wave really works and can be widely deployed. "According to the NGMN Alliance, 6G development should focus on demonstrable user needs and avoid unnecessary replacement of existing 5G radio access network equipment."
- Incipient 1y agoI don't get why Huawei gets specific hate? Shouldn't this equally apply to all Chinese vendors? I wouldn't expect any are less susceptible to government control?
- zweifuss 1y agoZTE is also under scrutiny. The reason it's only Huawei and ZTE is that other Chinese providers are so insignificant that the telecoms will likely be able to replace the infrastructure themselves with spares or consolidation. However, in an emergency, the government would have to foot the bill for replacing Huawei/ZTE systems quickly, as the telecoms couldn't finance this and lack of capacity would mean very high prices.
- hmm37 1y agoHuawei at least is giving their source code to be scrutinized. What can be said of other vendors?
- esbranson 1y agoHuawei simply accumulated a much more court-defensible paper trail—dominant presence, documented code issues, clearer evidence of state leverage, and heavier export-control exposure.
- ge96 1y agoNortel
- culi 1y agoIsn't the same true for American tech companies?
- applied_heat 1y agoHuawei is often blamed for stealing information from Nortel that led to Nortel’s bankruptcy, both information about deals being made that let Huawei undercut them and technical product details that allowed Huawei to more easily be a substitute for Nortel products
- kwanbix 1y agoNice, in 2025, the world is a place where China can not be trusted, Russia can not be trusted, USA can not be trusted, Europe can not be trusted, etc. We are very far from the "imagine all the people, living live in peace". I wonder why that is...
- tippa123 1y ago[dead]
- deepsun 1y agoNice how you put them all on one row. How Isaac Asimov said in "Relativity of wrong": "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together".
- peterlk 1y agoI’m working my way through “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”, and the main thesis is that everyone is preparing for demographic collapse. Global populations are declining almost everywhere, and this breaks the current global order. For example, what does the Chinese economy look like when all the people subject to the one child policy retire? What are the knock on effects of labor becoming more expensive almost everywhere? Can immigration solve this problem? What about the cultural friction of mass immigration? What happens to the places that everyone emigrates from? The book basically argues that a significant amount of the world is headed for destabilization, and a destabilized world involves a lot less trust. Side note: personally, I find the writing style and general tone to be hyperbolic, but some of the analysis is interesting.
- ferguess_k 1y agoI think we are already seeing this happening as it is not rocket science. US is not willing to be the world police anymore, because it is more and more expensive and some of the elites and many ordinary people feel that they are not gaining much as return. So this left and is going to leave a lot of power gaps around the globes, and regional wars are picking up paces. China is not particularly happy about this, because it is not ready and perhaps don't even want to be the next world police. US has always wanted China to share the responsibility but China is hesitant, which is understandable. Plus most of the people in China do not want a destabilized world, for now. What I'd expect that China will gradually lose steam (actually people on HN already observed since like 10 years ago) when the people born in the 1970s/1980s retire. The officials who are resistant to the idea of expansion (because it damages their power base) are going to retire then. I'd expect the world to be a LOT hotter then. So that's about 2030-2040 and might come a bit earlier as the other players are already moving the pieces(e.g. Russia). Not sure how to prepare my family through that time, though. I mean, it's just my guess, so my wife just rolls up her eye and wants to buy more houses/stocks because "houses/stocks always go up if you look at the chart". What I think is that the whole economical-geopolitico logic is going to change forever, and what is gone is gone for good. The next globalization is maybe 50 years away but we will never see it. From hindsight, I believe the 2008 financial crisis was the turning points. They managed to drag it for another 20 years, which I send my kudos. Again, just my guess. I have always wronged in the pessimistic side so I hope I'm wrong this time again.
- fodmap 1y agoOn the other hand Spain is using Huawei servers for almost all of their sensitive data. I wonder how the UE, and NATO, will react to that, because they're using Huawei for Social Security data, wiretapping data (SITEL), or even Intelligence Services data. https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intelligence-agency-wiretaps https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intell...
- coliveira 1y agoAnd Spain will have 6G and all the niceties of telecom technology, while Germany will be stuck forever on 5G.
- jojomodding 1y agoWhat makes you believe Huawei is the only company that will ever be able to build 6G hardware for the entire remaining lifetime of the universe?
- NoiseBert69 1y agoHuawei and other Chinese companies laid huge patent minefields around pretty much every modern high-speed radio technology. If you ever worked in 5G/6G/Wifi/etc. standardization you will quickly see one thing: they know their job. So even if you rip out all Chinese hardware - you will still have to pay money to them if you replace it with local stuff from Nokia/Ericson/etc.
- coliveira 1y agoScale. Huawei has 1.4 billion customers just in China. They have double this around the world. The US and European markets have become small for the scale of next generations telecom.
- amaccuish 1y agoI get why you do so, but the European Union is always shortened to EU, not UE. It would be as if I wrote a sentence, "The EWG was created by the treaty of Rome in 1957". What is EWG? Oh yes its the German abbreviation for the EEC. But we're writing in English?
- tchalla 1y ago> “We’ll discuss with industry what we can do, not only to make ourselves independent from China, but also for example independent from the USA, independent from the big tech companies,” Merz said. Good to know it's not just China. > Merz ruled out fully decoupling from China, which is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner. “We can’t do that,” he said. “China can’t do that, but we can do it even less.” And even better to know that the move is practical and understands who has the upper hand.
- V__ 1y agoAt the same time they are exploring the use of Palantir and want to use more of Microsofts 365 cloud. This is all just talk. Either there are very real security concerns or someone lobbied heavily.
- qwertox 1y agoThis is the most incredible thing about it. As soon as Palantir has a foot in the the door of the authorities, only a disaster will be able to get them banned. And that disaster is way past the point of all the citizen's data getting collected and analyzed in real-time, because that's what our authorities want: full insights.
- coliveira 1y ago> Good to know it's not just China. If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you. They're using this to hide the real reason for the move, which is to do Washington's bid, just like a good colony does.
- tchalla 1y agoI won't be surprised if they do the Washington's bid. A few years ago, they wouldn't even consider it. By the time we all die, may be they will.
- sunaookami 1y agoYeah, it's just lip service until a democrat is president again. Same happened last time, it's like we time-travelled back to 2016, every argument is exactly the same in politics and media.
- MangoToupe 1y agoSo fun that the west is moving in a direction where we are subject to all the negatives of both capitalism (wealth consolidation) and socialism (lack of competition).
- iso1631 1y agoUnchecked capitalism inevitably leads to a lack of competition, it's just a matter of who gets the benefits. The west went wrong when it stopped checking capitalism
- outside1234 1y agoWonder if this was one of the secret requirements Trump made to avoid more draconian tariffs
- rzerowan 1y agoWhose 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.
- paganel 1y ago> 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.
- rzerowan 1y agoThe 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.
- dragonelite 1y agoThis summer i was traveling through Germany and god fucking dam their telecommunication infrastructure is just 3rd world tier, so freaking bad. Constant signal loss, 5g was a rare sight etc.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoAll this is because they're afraid $COUNTRY inserted malware in the chips, right? So industry can solve this. Make a device that has all the hardware for networks, but without the chip. Make a simple hardware standard for the chip interface. Publish the standard. Now any country can make a chip that plugs into the networking device. Just buy your own country's spyware-laden chip, plug it into the NID. Install your software in the NID, the same way you'd install Linux on an AMD vs Intel computer. Works for PCs; it can work for routers (they're all just computers). Choose open source or an expensive proproprietary OS. Choose open hardware or proprietary hardware. Let people assemble them from parts so they can choose their level of surveillance-avoidance. And you're done. No more banning entire manufacturers; just ban those specific kinds of chips, but buy the cheap chinese hardware sans-chips. Feels a lot more sustainable than global instability and trade wars over what is essentially just a lack of design. (I'm aware how specialized router hw/sw is, I worked for Cisco once upon a time. but it can all be abstracted. it's just not in the interest of corporate profits to do so; but at this point, i think ramping down the china-phobia and stabilizing trade is a bigger concern)
- hereme888 1y agoAmazing to read in a site full of devs and cybersecurity experts how willing they are to use Huawei's tech despite all the international theft and security issues, some exposed, and but most of it kept under wraps until investigations are complete. And some even shill the conspiracy that the NSA will install backdoors in US equipment... I would like to think it's Chinese agents at work, but most likely it's regular people. For this reason I'm glad politicians are taking the initiative, despite the population's awareness of what Huawei really is. And sry but I don't have time to "prove it with irrefutable evidence" as some may demand. Plz spend your own time researching the facts.
- hereme888 11mo agoEven worse, apparently Huawei allows the CCP to daily update their nodes, lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfuBdhPJAbU&t=798 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfuBdhPJAbU&t=798
- corimaith 1y agoI feel that the majority in this thread are acting less in Europe's interests than effectively saying "fuck you" to Germany here for acting against China's interests. Or perhaps they're reaching as quickly as possible to blame everything on USA. But that's the consequence of letting outsiders into the conversation, everything has really turned into a "water armies", as defined by the Chinese themselves. In any case, I do hope that outsiders in this thread realize this isn't indicative of what Westerners think, so as far much as what their enemies are thinking. Do you really think people like these who are so quick to mock Europe are really your friends?
- fidotron 1y agoThe fundamental problem with the newer Huawei equipment is it's the best stuff. Others just aren't competing properly at all. As the west detaches from China, for quite plausible security concerns, it's going to find it expensive on both ends: they will be paying more and getting less.
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoThey just found kill switches in Chinese buses, so any Chinese network equipment is 100% guaranteed to be backdoored. Who do you think hacks our hospitals? Who do you think attacks infrastructure? Some kid in Lebanon isn’t going to attack a hospital. We’re at war, everyone knows it but us.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoWouldn't it be wiser, fairer, and less xenophobic/nationalistic appearing to simply require particular audit/compliance/certification requirements and then disallow nonconforming equipment/systems? Because if something can't be sold under brand X specifically, then brand Y will be invented to circumvent it, hence it's a superficial and ineffective process to forbid a brand by name. Rigorous audit and compliance processes should assure products are tested, supported, and hopefully minimize the risks of hostile anti-functionality. Perhaps some key tech bits are so fundamental that they should be grown domestically without necessarily a huge profit motive to offer reliable components for strategic infrastructure.