Huawei with your rural subsidies ban: Chinese comms bogeyman fires sueball at US regulator

Huawei Technologies today filed a fresh lawsuit against the US Federal Communications Commission over its decision to ban rural carriers from buying the company's mobile hardware with Universal Service Fund (USF) cash. The mobile giant's argument, per its filing in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is that the FCC …

[MiguelC]

Mike Pompeo is doing a European Tour trying to coerce EU governments away from Huawei. Again. Seems a bit desperate.

[Warm Braw]

The FCC didn't give Huawei due process

Due process doesn't seem to be the FCC's strong suit.

[Blockchain commentard]

Why doesn't China ban Chinese telco's from using Cisco kit? They do tit-for-tat with import tariffs, why not telco/ISP hardware?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Because China has more to lose by losing infrastructure and consumer sales in the West than it gains by getting business at home, especially because no govt dept in China is going to buy Cisco anyway.

It wants a ruling that the US applies US law to US companies irrespective of where their parents are from.

Or more strategically, it forces the US govt to be consistent and ban all Chinese telecoms if it is going to ban Huawei. That means no Lenovo, no Motorola etc

[W.S.Gosset]

Because as various commentards have posted in the past from their personal experience, Chinese telcos already buy magically-identical kit from Huawei without paying for all that nasty R&D cost.

AND score brownie points with the CCP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your head on!

Huawei isn't your Friend.

It isn't even a trustworthy Vendor.

It should be banned in the West the same way 64Bit Architecture chips are in China for obvious reasons.

By the time most CellHeads realize they are wholly owned by the ISP's it will be too late, their Credit Score will be in the red.

[Alister]

Re: Get your head on!

You need your tin-foil hat checking, it appears to be leaking.

[big_D]

Re: Get your head on!

Allegedly untrustworthy.

On the other hand, Cisco, HP, AT&T & Co. have proven that they are untrustworthy... If you are going to ban all untrustworthy companies, you aren't going to have many companies left to deal with.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: Get your head on!

Your Huawei assertions would be a lot more believable if someone, anyone, could present some credible proof to back up these allegations. Never seems to appear though, just more paranoid blather and FUD.

[EnviableOne]

Re: Get your head on!

according to the GHCQ team set up to monitor Huawei's kit for the UK market, Huawei are not in league with anyone, their kit is just so insecure world+dog could get in wothout too much effort.

The real reason the Cheeto in Chief wants to block them is there is NO US company that is even watching the same game, let alone in the same ballpark as their wireless infrastructure technology.

the only firms that are anywhere near are Nokia and Ericson, and samsung are catching up, CISCO dont even hit the top 10.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Get your head on!

"Huawei are not in league with anyone, their kit is just so insecure world+dog could get in wothout too much effort."

Huawei are _far_ from the only company with this issue.

One of the less amusing aspects of all this: If folks recall the big "hacking Huawei kit" presentations about 6 years ago - looking more closely at the switched and routers in question showed the unmistakable syntax of Comware - remembering that Huawei and 3com had a licensing agreement for a while.

Sure enough, checking showed the exact same sets of vulnerabilities that were in the presentation were present in 3Com kit. HOWEVER, they _weren't_ in Huawei's Wind River Linux VRP-cored kit (essentially everything since 2011) but those SAME vulnerabilities started showing up in comware-based HP equipment.

Very much a case of "Huawei's kit is full of holes, and we should know, because we sold the holes to them"

[martinusher]

Re: Get your head on!

Huawei is probably getting a whole lot of grief from the Feds because its not providing the NSA with suitable backdoors. I'd guess that its a side effect of proving to world+dog that its not acting as a Chinese version of five eyes -- if purchasers can peruse the inner workings of the kit and know that its clean then its useless for NSA purposes.

(BTW -- You may also have also noticed that when it comes to cell infrastructure kit we're down to just three vendors -- Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia.)

(BTW2 -- "The West"? Where, exactly is this?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Huawei to the danger phone

If we're told by our own security services that the code quality is not good, then it's probable they or other bad actors can exploit those vulnerabilities to install a backdoor.

Most organisations can't be trusted, even if 99% of the people are nice, all it takes is one insider with the right privileges to abuse their power. In the case of Huawei as with all large Chinese companies, it's required that CCP representatives are present throughout the organisation, and they report back to the party. Imagine if Trump required all major US corporations to employ his political insiders at all levels and report back to him?

[stewwy]

Re: Huawei to the danger phone

Well in the US it's the other way round US companies have agents inside the government

[2Blockchainz]

Forcing EU to choose sides

So why is the US a more favorable EU Ally than China? WWII and the Cold War were a long time ago. It seems the US primary interest is selling overpriced, outdated Telco gear and military hardware. Let's be completely candid, their military performance, apart from their questionable ethics, from 2003-2013 wasn't exactly impressive. Their electorate is also loathe to exert global influence.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Forcing EU to choose sides

" It seems the US primary interest is selling overpriced, outdated Telco gear and military hardware."

Not quite. It's mercantilist/monopolist dominance of the marketplace, where the government and private industry become hard to tell apart - think of the way the UK government and the East India Company became so heavily tied together that when the EIC was hitting its third bankruptcy, it was able to get laws passed allowing it to bypass England and directly export untaxed tea from India to Massachusetts (with import taxes exempted too - which made a bunch of Bostonian tea smugglers who had large stores kept in canadian warehouses cross enough to put on fancy dress and have a party in the harbour...)

American colonial ambitions are likely to run into a similar fate sooner or later.

[Pascal Monett]

"Everybody I've spoken to is not going to go forward"

And Mexico is going to pay for the wall, and China will pay the tariffs.

Yeah, we know you, Donald. You live in a curious little world that will soon no longer affect us.