Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee The British government should rip out Huawei's 5G mobile network equipment regardless of the facts because doing so would curry favour with Donald Trump's US, Parliament's Defence Committee has said in an extraordinary new report. The Conservative-dominated committee said in this morning's report, The Security of 5G, that the …
While I fully agree that this should theoretically not be a valid reason, based on the isolated international situation the UK has brought itself into with an unregulated Brexit upcoming, cozying up to literally anyone/anything it can find may well be a practically very valid reason for political decisions ...
Expect more of this kind of "decision making" in the near future...
What was that slogan again? "Take back control"? Well ...
Yeh, its foolish, Trump wanted to cut a deal with Xi anyway, you can see from the Bolton book:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-asked-chinas-xi-to-help-him-win-reelection-according-to-bolton-book/2020/06/17/d4ea601c-ad7a-11ea-868b-93d63cd833b2_story.html
"President Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 U.S. election, telling Xi during a summit dinner last year that increased agricultural purchases by Beijing from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects, according to a damning new account of life inside the Trump administration by former national security adviser John Bolton."
If Xi & China had done "Trump a favor though", then Trump would have done a quid-pro-quo. Xi and Trump would be best buddies, they would be on the wrong side of Trump.
Alternatively, if UK wants to curry favor with Trump (as Cotton is suggesting they should), Trumps's broke, and that golf course in Scotland is pissing away money. They could "do him a favor though" and receive a nice "quid pro quo" in return, nudge nudge wink wink. Am I right Tom Cotton?? Nudge nudge wink wink.
Best to just make choice in the best UK interests, me thinks.
Suez really was the turning point where Isreal, France and the UK learned who was really in charge of the New (post WWII) World Order
And it wasn't them.
Interesting about the downvotes though.
Do you not believe me or not like the UK's position in the world? Not according with your fantasy perhaps of "Taking back control"?
In June Cotton described the Chinese company as "a criminal organisation" to the committee during a Parliamentary hearing, belligerently asking Labour's Kevan Jones MP: "Why would you be so eager to use this technology?"
I'm sure Cotton will be well aware that in his legislature it's the committee's job to ask questions and the witness's to answer them. He seems to have some difficulty in grasping that the same thing applies here.
D10 The top ten democracies is an interesting concept. Godd luck with finding ten good democracies.
Both Ellwoid and Cotton are the worst kind of rabid conservatives. Parliamentary Committees are only advisory and often seem to be a base touching exercise with lobbyists of one kind or another.
The UK Government and mobile service operators should continue investment in OpenRAN technology and work to make the UK a global leader, not just in technological development, but also in production.
More like cloud-cuckoo land. Where, apart from a massive subsidy bucket, is the incentive of operators to invest? For years customers have been voting with their wallets, which has kept revenues well below expectations. Huawei and others have working kit now in which the UK government's own agencies cannot find any backdoors.
The UK doesn't have an electronics industry anymore so it's not going to start producing radio kit. And the government doesn't have anything like the cash needed to set one up, apart from the fact that it's also busy spaffing cash that is doesn't have on other pet projects. And this is supposed to be government by a party known for its financial responsibility.
And 4g is 3g with bells and whistles. And 3g is 2g with bells and whistles. And 2g is 1g with bells and whistles. And 1g is a backronym for cellular mobile telephones. And cellular mobile telephones are just radiotelephone with bells and whistles. And radiotelephone is just voice mode radio with bells and whistles. And voice mode radio is just radiotelegraphy with bells and whistles.
It's all just radio at the end of the day.
And 4g is 3g with bells and whistles.
Not really, LTE switched from a connection-based approach still used in UMTS to TCP/IP. So, it's not about how the radios work but the processing the signals the radios send and receive. Packet switching didn't make much sense before about 2010 as the vast majority of traffic was voice that wouldn't tolerate the latency that this would involve.
Switching to TCP/IP was designed to make future upgrades of the stack much smoother with no need to run parallel infrastructure or force people to buy new devices – by this point the networks had realised that they don't benefit from people buying new shiny things.
"And 1g is a backronym for cellular mobile telephones."
Your 1g is, in fact, the first GSM mobile telephone system. It wasn't the first cellular system; that was TACS. And TACS wasn't the first mobile system. Back in the mid-80s the bit of BT that eventually became part of O2 still had a product called System 4 running alongside the newly introduced TACS.
1g was analogue Vodafone and Cellnet (not part of BT)
2g introduced digital, circuit switching, billed per second, added one2one and Orange(Hutchinson)
2.5g was GPRS, packetr switching, started billiing by data usage (one2one became T-Mobile, BT Bought Cellenet)
2.75g was EDGE, basically faster GPRS
3g was CDMA, added 3 to the mix (Hutchinson who sold Orange to Vf->MM->FT) (BT Sell O2 to telefonica)
3.5g was HSDPA
3.75g was HSDPA+
4G is LTE - ads MIMO (T-Mobile and Orange Become EE)
4.5G is LTE-A -multiband
5G is 5GNR - tri band support with posible Gb/s Speed and variable speed cells (BT Buy EE)
TBH the main difference is the number of devices per cell.
So, the upgrade is really only needed to support all those lovely IoT devices we are all placing everywhere and will do more in the future.
My local street light supplier is already talking about 5G enabled lamp posts. I swiftly pointed out that we don't even get 3G!
Actually, 2G used by Smart Meters, still only works in half the village, so half of us still have to manually read our electricity meters (no gas in most small villages) and then send it in!
Coat icon as I need to go outside to read the meter.
> whereas 5G in the future could provide up to 10Gbit/s
"Could" is the catchword here: It could, but most likely wont in the vast majority of places, simply because you can legally claim "5G coverage" with about any bandwidth. Just say the magic word "up to".
(Besides, slowing it down allows you to speed it up a couple years later and sell it as "5G+", in an attempt to delay as long as commercially possible having to invest in 6G.)
Government privatised IT systems are far worse than Huawei and wasted more money. The companies runnng these need more investigatiion, but there are far too many consultants commisions involved to influential advisors.
BT and previous governments were largely responsible for destroying UK telecomms industry by handing over contracts and Intellectual Property to Huawei. (this in addition to Marconi directors's financial greed and incompetence)
Any other European country would have protected the industry but this country has always been controlled by bankers and investors only looking at short term cash in their pockets.
"handing over contracts and Intellectual Property to Huawei."
Would that be the Huawei that has a large number of telecoms patents of its own? Or the Huawei that was about to establish an R&D base in Cambridge? Or was it the Huawei which, alone of the telecoms equipment providers, made arrangements to have its software open for examination to UK security*?
At the very least we should demand any alternative equipment providers be as open as Huawei has been compelled to be. Who knows - if that were the situation we could actually make informed decisions on the basis of technical merit.
* Who seem to have found poor coding standards but nothing malicious.
National Cyber Security is a Phantom Wish Quango, AC, a Ponzi Wannabe Sinecure. The Informative IntelAIgent Space one imagines it has been set up to police and micromacromanage has neither secure impenetrable walls nor vaults nor fences behind which to contain unseen and secret, almighty destructive, sensitive proprietary intellectual property for the exclusive enriching of failed executive administrations.
It is just as one of those cold comfort blankets which dodgy systems give out for one to pull over one's head as more rotten toxic cans and rusty explosive canisters are kicked further on down the road you are following to nowhere good and not worth going to.
And it's also a massive black hole money pit for every guarantee of stellar secure performance is impossible to deliver and therefore a fraudulent transaction that just churns through flash cash. I wonder if that makes it attractive as a money laundering facility/utility or is such a crime?
45* is going to be out of the White House and on the path to prison in a bit over three months.
Cozying up to him is an incredibly stupid move. At this point, it would well behoove the English government to start cozying up to Biden.
*Illegitimate because of his collusion with Putin, among other things. And he lost the election by 3 million votes. Forever impeached. NOT MY PRESIDENT.
But he's right. Trump has no shame, no honour, and will do anything to cling to the power he has. His opposition has no effective means of countering him or that.
I don't believe Biden is as frail as made out but being the nice guy isn't enough. And I do feel the right-wingers are correct when they say Biden's attempts to appeal to the centre is alienating some on the left - More so outside the US where "left" actually is left of centre, not the moderate right.
But it doesn't matter anyhow. America has become so polarised and divided that it's now simply a vote for one tribe or the other. It's so polarised that I can't believe there is anyone with a cluon who did not make up their minds a long time ago which tribe they belong to and who they will be voting against.
It's now a numbers game. Which tribe has the most members, how many will vote, how many votes will simply disappear.
The committee wants the UK to align with US demands made allegedly on security grounds. This isn't the same as aligning with Donald Trump, that is The Register's interpretation.
Having said that, I don't expect US relations with China generally or Huawei in particular to become suddenly cordial under a new President. Scepticism about Huawei's good faith is a British and American position by default anyway, and with the damage having been done already by the Trump administration, President Biden isn't going to reverse it in a hurry. He would lose face by doing it which is important, he would look like the traitor that Trump has been calling him since probably 2008, and if the decision was followed by any undesirable consequence whatsoever - say, a quarter of the Internet taking Chinese New Year day as a holiday for half an hour - Biden would be excoriated.
It can be imagined that the World Trade Organization would adjudicate that the US is unfairly discriminating against a Chinese business, but President Trump is no fool and he doesn't give a toot about that argument, so President Biden won't have to, either.
Now when it comes to the Tiktok thing, Trump looks like a child having a tantrum, even to supporters.
US/China relations won't do a 180 if Biden is elected, but he isn't a man child who thinks Twitter tantrums and sudden policy reversals without telling his state department are clever negotiating ploys. He wants to set things up so that all negotiations have to go through him, because he doesn't care in the slightest about what is good for the country or the world, only what is good for him personally and politically.
So Biden will send out state department people to negotiate, and they will be empowered to agree to things within the boundaries that his administration sets, without worrying that Biden will suddenly tweet something that pulls the rug out from under them and things that had previously agreed upon have to be taken back.
Way to openly declare that UK Government is ready and willing to bend over and take it every time Washington gets the urge.
Oh, and if you're worried about "overseas technology", well guess what ? The USA is overseas from you too.
You cannot hype an unproven, undocumented issue from country A when you are promoting dealing with country B instead, which has been proven and widely documented to do the exact same thing you are shrieking country A might do.
This whole thing is bullshit and is starting to seriously annoy me.
Your last paragraph - could not agree more. But it’s worse than that. Go to the House of Commons website (and please, pretty please, El Reg provide links when you refer to this kind of report) the opening words are :
“ The UK Government wants to be a global leader in 5G”.
What does that even mean? The “U.K. Government” (sic) wants to be a leader ..... not the U.K? But not in production .... in usage? Which cloud cuckoo land are they inhabiting?
That is exactly how politics operates.
I always liked the French line that "Politicians get money from the rich and votes from the poor by promising to protect one group from the other"
As good a definition of how politicians (not politics) operate as I have ever seen.
The trade-based war between HuaWei and the USA has little to do with technology.
Why would the UK accept anything emanating from USA politicians, all busy shovelling cash into their pockets from Lobbyists. Few US politicians are immune from this bribery, er . . . lobbying. The fact that Australia swallowed the lies from the US means nothing, it is a sheep adopting US 'culture', with the exception of driving standards.
The only reason anyone would want to cuddle up with Trump is to make money or catch STDs. He is a con artist, a liar, thief and embezzler. Come to think of it, most of these are prerequisites for politicians.
At least HuaWei will make a pile of money from it's bulging portfolio of 5G patents.
Many Brits would be happy with 3G and fibre optic before the investment in a radio system whose range is measured in yards or metres.
"A new D10 alliance, that unites the world's ten strongest democracies, would provide a viable alternative foundation to the technological might of authoritarian states, whose true motives are, at times, murky." ..... Obersturmführer Ellwood
Such conspiratorial nonsense is designed and dedicated to create such authoritarian states with wannabe Caesars at the virtual helm of mighty alternative technological operations.
Dream on, Obersturmführer, for that is a certain lemon to be squeezed dry to destruction that no fool or useful tool can ever accept as desirable whenever it be so clearly wanting.
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