The Huawei Situation

I just thought of an interesting hypothetical: if a non Canadian or European company were to license Huawei IP and manufacturer it themselves would that solve the Huawei “problem”?

I don’t think much of Huawei’s product is IP. They stole a lot of the IP from others, most notably from Nortel. Their place in the market is not because they have IP, it’s because they have slave level labour that works for very little money so they can be cheapest on the market.

ref: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china-steal-canada-s-edge-in-5g-from-nortel
ref: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/29/689663720/a-robot-named-tappy-huawei-conspired-to-steal-t-mobile-s-trade-secrets-says-doj

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They started out over 2 decades ago by copying the market leaders. But they have invested billions of their own money in networking, 4G and 5G technology over the last decade. They have advantages over the competition, compared to Nokia and Ericsson, their main competitors and they are streets ahead of the US companies, which pretty much slept through the revolution in high speed networking and are now at a severe disadvantage.

Interestingly, an interview in c’t with the DACH executive from Huawei, he made some interesting points. The kit from Huawei isn’t that much cheaper to purchase - the prices are pretty comparable - but they have more features and they are dramatically more energy efficient than the competition, which means that the running costs are a lot lower than the competition; not an unimportant factor in calculating the TCO of backbone and data centre kit.

@SamGreenwood I don’t think it would make much difference. The real problem is not that Huawei is Chinese, it is that they are so far ahead of the USA based networking companies that they can’t compete. If you look at what kit the Huawei stuff is being replaced with, it is mainly Nokia and Ericsson.

Huawei have demonstrated over the last decade that they are open to their code being scrutinised. They have several evaluation centres around the world, where companies, governments and the secret services can test the code and analyse the source code.

In fact, the one in the UK is jointly run by the equivalent of the NSA and they haven’t found any backdoors over the last decade - they have found plenty of “normal” security bugs which are being taken care of, but no back doors. Unlike, say, Cisco, which has spent the last 2 years removing dozens of back doors that have been discovered in their kit.

The problem isn’t Huawei or it being Chinese. The problem sits on the other side of the Pacific. We get blinded by our love of tech, but look at the tariffs that have been imposed on European vehicles, cheese and dozens of other products, to help bolster national businesses. Some of those were only averted when the EU threatened to put similar tariffs on products like Harley’s and Jack Daniels’.

Now they are threatening the UK with retaliation, because they won’t allow US chickens to be delivered to the UK - they don’t meet the food and safety standards of the EU and UK. The US chickens are chlorine-washed, which is illegal in the Europe and the Trump was kicking up a stink a few weeks back and threatening retaliation, if the UK didn’t accept sub-standard US chicken meat.

Why he didn’t try and get the US producers to up their game to meet international standards for meat quality, instead of threatening the UK is beyond me. Surely having a higher quality of meat in the USA is beneficial to US ciitzens, as well as for the export sales?

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Yeah but it seems that he (I assume you mean Trump) thinks it’s that it’s China, look at that new Clean Network plan.

I don’t presume you realized that you can’t share links from that site. In any case if I search for “Hauwei Technology Co.” I find 23. On the other hand, if I search for Nortel I find 16,185 results… which I think proves my point rather clearly.

Agreed, the Chinese government steals tech from all over

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