Reply to post: Re: Can't have the Chinese take over from US spying, old chap

Re: Can't have the Chinese take over from US spying, old chap

This is sort of what GCHQ were hinting at earlier in the year. While there is the Huawei/GCHQ outpost in Banbury, there is no similar facility for the other vendors, or for the telcos' own implementations of that kit (other than their in house security teams).

There kind of is.. Vendors (or users) can submit kit/designs to GCHQ/CESG for evaluation, and sometimes that's necessary before it can go live, ie in high security applications. Downside is that can be an expensive and time consuming process. Plus vendors can be reluctant to release internal architecture or source code needed for a decent evaluation. And then approvals can be conditional on a specific design, or software version, so updates would have to go through the approvals again.

Telcos, at least the large ones can do similar, so have their engineers crawling over the kit & testing for bugs, vulnerabilities etc. BT did that when evaluating Huawei's kit for their 21CN core. But not every telco has the resources or inclination to do the same, so if it's good enough for BT, it's good enough for them.

Which then gets to the meat of the problem, which is marketing. Lots of press releases saying Operator X installs our kit, making other customers more comfortable doing the same.. And not buying other vendor's kit instead. Which naturally upsets those vendors, even when they don't make equivalent kit, or if they do, it underperforms on features, price etc. That makes a huge difference on high volume stuff like RAN kit where you may be looking at buying edge router/switches by the thousands.. And then other factors also kick in. So a box designed to sit in an office/datacentre might not be happy sitting in a rooftop enclosure, so to use it, it'd cost more $$ to design & build enclosures to keep it happy.