Orange has an elegant solution to Huawei question in France: We'll stick with Nokia and Ericsson for 5G networks Orange, France's largest telecoms company, will use Nokia and Ericsson to deploy its 5G networks as pressure to ban Huawei from European networks mounts. The decision will please US authorities, who have pushed European allies to ban Huawei from their 5G infrastructure. Washington argues using the Chinese firm's kit might …
Huawei is the ONLY company that has opened its source code to governments for inspection.
Meanwhile no government talks about the constant stream of zero day vulnerabilities patched by cisco ... e.g.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/cisco-critical-bugs-nexus-data-center-switch-software-needs-patching-now/
https://threatpost.com/cisco-high-severity-bugs-2/148706/
Cisco has a Technology Verification Service for this sort of thing.
https://blogs.cisco.com/security/introducing-the-cisco-technology-verification-service
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/trust-center/transparency.html#~tab-tvs
Obviously no idea how easy it is to get in to do the inspection, but I can imagine that most European governments would qualify.
That sentence indicates that someone has not been paying attention.
The only reason behind the US' dislike of Huawei is that they are not under the control of the US. There are no US companies profiting and, more importantly, there is no possibility of them quietly giving access to US spooks and corporations to the insides.
It has between very little and absolutely no relevance to security. The security claim is to give SCROTUS something to pretend when the WTO accuses him of protectionism.
Not necessarily. It all depends on which "US authorities" you are talking to.
The better US intelligence agencies probably have a significant cache of vulnerabilities that they can work with. It might take more time to find them versus baked-in back doors, but Huawei has a reputation for poor code quality, so it probably isn't that difficult. So letting people think that the US doesn't have back doors is probably advantageous to their snooping of their others' networks.
The people and agencies that are upset with Huawei because of economic and nationalistic reasons are probably going to be the ones who are happy to hear this news. And I have little doubt that they were playing up the more sensational security threat aspect because nobody cares about boring corporate espionage and IP law.
I don't think this decision has anything to do with that. The French would quite easily use North Korean kit to piss off the Americans, if it thought it was safe. This the usual French industrial politics: IIRC Nokia got what was left of Alcatel-Lucent's networking kit and, as it's already in use at Orange, sticking with it makes most sense. Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei already cross-license much of the relevant IP so it shouldn't mean too much of a delay. For the technology that nobody in Europe needs right now™ anyway.
A lot of noise about 5G is being made by industry bodies basically looking for handouts.
Change is always the enemy of corporate budget departments. It's no surprise that Orange is going with what they have because upgrading kit always costs more in the short term and this year's income statement is all that corporations care about. Does anyone really think that Orange cares whether its customers are spied on by the Americans or Chinese?
'But for others, changing from Chinese-made kit is a costly decision. Telecoms association GSMA has said that replacing Huawei and fellow Chinese firm ZTE's gear, which is used in 40 per cent of European telco equipment, would add €55bn to the cost of building 5G networks in Europe and delay the technology by 18 months.'
Surely all of the equipment is standards based and can operate with other standards based equipment if not someone in procurement needs to be dragged over a few hot coals.
It's as if no one has learnt anything! We build things using proprietary gear, we end up in this situation, nobody learns. rinse repeat.
Made me wonder if BT, Voda and H3G in the UK could pursue compensation from the government for the 35% RAN cap. Suppose this Huawei limitation was not in their license agreements and could not have been expected. There again I guess it says they will honour all current and future regulatory legislation. Supposing the Boris edict becomes law as opposed to a sound bite.
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