You're always a day Huawei: UK to decide whether to ban Chinese firm's kit from 5G networks tomorrow

Huawei or another way? The British government is expected to decide tomorrow whether to include the Chinese tech giant's kit in the core of the UK's 5G networks at a meeting with the National Security Council. It is widely believed that prime minister Boris Johnson will continue to allow Huawei's equipment to be used on non- …

[unbender]

Are there any computing companies left in the USA that do actual R&D, you know develop new products?

This is nothing to do with security and everything to do with propping up failing American companies like Cisco who've taken their eye off the ball.

[rcxb]

This is nothing to do with security and everything to do with propping up failing American companies like Cisco who've taken their eye off the ball.

A band on Huawei 5G equipment would help Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung (none of which are domestic US companies last I checked), not Cisco.

Cisco just isn't one of the big competitors in the 5G space. Cisco and Huawei are competitors in core routing/switching equipment, and banning Huawei's 5G equipment won't really help them, there.

[Yes Me]

Who wins here?

I don't know about Samsung, but in reality Ericsson and Nokia are partially, if not largely, North American companies. Don't be fooled, all the security stories are bogus, in that everybody building such equipment (a) commits security blunders due to sheer complexity and (b) includes wire-tapping backdoors where possible, because their customers all require it. Huawei is the victim here, not the criminal.

Cisco is certainly very worried about Huawei becoming cheaper/better in core routers and switches too, but apparently they haven't successfully lobbied the black helicopter people in Washington DC and northern Virginia about this.

[Danny 5]

Re: Who wins here?

Nokia is a north American company? Really?

Last time I checked they were Finnish (|since 1865), but hey, what do I know.

[macjules]

Re: Who wins here?

Last time I checked Ericsson was a Swedish company, as in Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.

[CheesyTheClown]

Treasury Notes

If Huawei is allowed into western teleco networks, the governments will have to cover the purchase of this equipment by issuing treasury notes. If China does not spend those notes, which they do less and less often and instead stockpile them, they gain more control of them. At some point, if China decides it needs to buy things from the world, they will use them as currency. When they do this, if they need to make a massive purchase (think $100 billion) whichever government they are purchasing from may decide the risk of holding that much currency in treasury notes would be difficult to manage. So China will sell treasury notes to multiple other countries and banks who will negotiate favorable terms of exchange for themselves. This will result in flooding the market and therefore devaluing the power of said notes. This is a major security (not as in guns and bombs, but as it in financial security) risk for any country who holds U.S. treasury notes. Weaker economies can actually collapse because of this. Stronger economies can lose their purchasing power in China.

[Nick Porter]

Re: Treasury Notes

Huawei is already in Western telco networks - 3 of the 4 UK MNOs already use tons of the stuff.

And I'm failing to follow your argument of why the government would have to buy Huawei kit for the MNOs if Huawei kit was not banned. I mean, what on earth would lead you to that conclusion?

[fajensen]

Re: Treasury Notes

Uhhuh - The Fed and the ECB can print multiples of 100's of billions and buy all of those treasuries in one mornings trading session, China dumping Everything wouldn't even cause a blip on the exchange.

No, The whole thing is about Donald Trump draining the swamp only to be refilling it with raw sewage. Then letting new-and-improved swamp-creatures made from pure garbage, like Pompeo, run around and stink up the world at large!

Listen to the guy: "To preserve it's sovereignty Britain had better do Exactly what the Fuck I say!

[phuzz]

Re: Treasury Notes

Britain lost it's sovereignty in 1956, and we'd only do something daft if we got it back.

[Pier Reviewer]

Re: Treasury Notes

“ If Huawei is allowed into western teleco networks, the governments will have to cover the purchase of this equipment by issuing treasury notes.”

Wtf are you smoking? The gear will be purchased by EE, O2, Voda etc using their own cash, not the UK government bonds. They are private companies, and the money Huawei receives is kept by Huawei, which is owned by its (Chinese) employees, not the state. Ffs stop reading Breitbart propaganda and get some kind of clue as to how business works.

[Shak]

Loss of Sovereignty

For example by allowing another country to dictate who you can or cannot buy stuff from.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Loss of Sovereignty

It's OK, we're taking back control.

[macjules]

Re: Loss of Sovereignty

Exactly. The Daily Mail says so, so it must be true. Nice to see that the US government uses the Daily Mail as its fount of all knowledge: the rest of us just wipe parts of our body with it.

[Poncey McPonceface]

Tight Leash

The .gov.uk decision will indicate how tight the leash is.

If an outright ban then we can infer that UK foreign policy is dictated from across the water.

This fairly mundane tech story is getting a *lot* of coverage: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=huawei&iar=news&ia=news

“The PM's comments came after Robert Buckland, the Justice Secretary, said the UK will 'take into account the views of other sovereign states' but ultimately the 'decision we make will be based upon our own sovereign right to choose'.” –– possibly directed at the likes of Pompeo? We'll see, won't we? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933473/Justice-Secretary-Robert-Buckland-warns-against-trying-bully-Britain-Huawei.html

[Scott Broukell]

Thin end of the wedge

Next thing you know the Chinese will be building all the Huawei stations along the route of HS2.

<mine's the one with the (replacement bus) timetables in the pocket>

[fajensen]

Re: Thin end of the wedge

If the Chinese had built the HS2, it would have been up and running already for a couple of years!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Thin end of the wedge

However, it would have gone in long, dead straight lines with everything in the way cleared out, embankments and cuttings as needed and roads in inconvenient directions would end on one side of embankments and restart on the other.

[steelpillow]

Dear US negotiator

Your own President tweeted some time ago that the Huawei issue is a commercial one not a security one. The British security services have, after long analysis, determined that there is no security problem.

Do you understand why both your own President and the British security services disagree with you?

Do you understand why your president now also appears to disagree with himself? (We do, and greed features highly).

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Dear US negotiator

This! Trump even promised to lessen the ban if the Chinese played ball regarding the trade war trump has started.

[Snake]

Re: Dear US negotiator

Our president disagrees with anything that appears outside his blinders because, like the animal that wears them, he is an ass.

But 39% of our electorate (always) seems attracted to that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dear US negotiator

Every ass has at least one hole behind it.

[werdsmith]

There’s already a stack of Huawei kit in the 4G infrastructure.

There’s already tens of thousands of Huawei consumer communications products in use.

Bolt that stable door.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Bolt that stable door."

The 5G horse is still in the stable. But can US companies make their sales without either paying Huawei royalties are infringing patents?

[werdsmith]

The 5G horse is still in the stable.

That's great but if the 4G horse has already bolted, it won't make much difference which service people connect with.

[Nick Porter]

There's already a stack of 5G kit in the current 5G roll out.

Presumably if the government ban it, and it all has to be ripped out, then the MNOs will be seeing the government in court for compensation.

[werdsmith]

There's already a stack of 5G kit in the current 5G roll out.

To be fair, you'd struggle to do a 5G rollout without 5G kit.

[Rich 2]

This is the thing I don't get. There's all this fuss about 5G, but as far as I know, even if Huwawei was to be blocked from 5G, nobody seems to be expecting EE, Vodafone, etc to rip out all the existing 3G/4G kit.

There's nothing special about 5G that makes it more back-door-able than lesser-G kit

Politics really is populated by a bunch of cockwombles with no clue at all.

[Oh Homer]

Yellow Devil

Maybe somebody can explain this mystery, but why exactly are we even considering what amounts to sanctions against a country (yes, this is really about the Chinese government, not a company) that we've never been at war with, which we freely accept £45 billion worth of imports from every year, and which stands to gain nothing from damaging our diplomatic and economic relations, by means of spying, nuking, or any other hostile act?

Now repeat the above paragraph, but substitute £45 billion with $558 billion, then ask the same question of the megalomaniacal Trump regime.

[Chris G]

Re: Yellow Devil

You title explains a good deal.

The Chinese do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion, in fact they are officially atheist.

They are also threatening to divert a greal of much needed wealth from the top 0.1% in the West, add to that the fact that they embrace socialism, free education and healthcare and you have the devil incarnate.

[Oh Homer]

Re: officially atheist

Well I was being a tad disingenuous, but my question was not entirely rhetorical.

Regardless of cultural differences, and the Yanks' long-standing hysterical paranoia over, well, frankly anything not American, you'd think they'd at least have the acumen to suck it up and just get on with it out of economic necessity. Moreover, the fact that the Chinese are such significant trading partners, which the Yanks benefit from significantly, makes the Yanks' hostility seem not only irrational but utterly hypocritical.

In other words, if the Yanks hate the Chinese so much, stop trading with them, put up or shut up, and quit whining.

Of course, we all know why they will never do that.

Hypocritical bastards.

[Screwed]

Re: Yellow Devil

I know it was quite a long time ago, but was there not some skirmish now often called the American War of Independence?

[Intractable Potsherd]

Re: Yellow Devil

That list looks remarkably thin - the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia; Poland; Russia; and Bulgaria all seem to be missing for a start. Exactly what definition of "invaded" is being used, and over what period of time?

[Roj Blake]

Re: Yellow Devil

Crimean War?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yellow Devil

Britain did invade Russia after WW1, in an attempt to stop Bolshevism.

[Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?]

Re: Yellow Devil

Oh my god, you're absolutely right!

Once Brexit is done, we're invading Vatican City!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice car company you got in Solihull

Wouldn't want anything to happen to it.

At this point the government has to try to look long term and decide whether we need to align to an increasingly protectionist and aggressive US or a rising China.

[Jedit]

"Vodafone could lose up to £70m"

Pardon me if I shed no tears for the company who evaded, what, £7bn in taxes and when caught were told they'd only have to pay less than half of it back. They're not short of a crust.

[Venerable and Fragrant Wind of Change]

Re: "Vodafone could lose up to £70m"

Evaded taxes? Citation needed.

If you mean, they paid little or no corporation tax for several years, that's because they were offsetting previous huge losses - which is standard practice. The losses came from paying government for that 3G spectrum licence.

Their crime was being UK-registered, so that their 3G losses and subsequent tax offsets were more visible here than other telcos (it was only much later that BT bought EE, bringing us back a second UK-registered mobile telco).

[Jedit]

Re: "Evaded taxes? Citation needed."

Presented for your entertainment, Vodafone And Juliet: A Travesty in Three Acts.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/dec/20/inland-revenue-sweetheart-tax-deals

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/06/07/could-vodafones-non-payment-of-tax-be-down-to-hmrcs-sweetheart-deal/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sweetheart-deal-taxman-dave-hartnett-joins-accountancy-firm-deloitte-8633686.html

Dave Hartnett's sweetheart deal with Vodafone is well known, coming as it did just as austerity cuts to the approximate value of said deal were being made to local council services across the UK.

[John Sturdy]

Another redirection of our attention?

Certain western governments talk as though the problem is that the Chinese might have put spy software in Huawei equipment, but I wonder whether they're more concerned that they can't put spy software in it themselves?